
Class. 
Book.. 



,Cr55 



fopyrightN - 



COPMUGHT DEPOStT. 



THE PILGRIM 

Essays on Religion 



T. R. GLOVER 

FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND 
PUBLIC ORATOR IN THE UNIVERSITY 

Author of "The Jesus of History' 9 "Jesus in 
The Experience of Men/' etc. 




NEW ^tSJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



/f 



< 

'&«* 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



\> 



*tf 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



APR -5 '23 

©C1A698872 



R. G. 

QUIDQUID EX ILLO AMAVIMUS 

QUIDQUID MIRATI SUMUS 

MANET MANSURUMQUE EST 



PREFACE 

A volume of collected papers must have some 
central idea, and perhaps that central idea is given 
clearly enough in the title and in the article that 
stands first. All the sections of the book turn upon 
the spiritual life, and on that interpretation of it 
which we find in the New Testament, in its pre- 
cursors and in those who in art and life have de- 
veloped and elucidated it. 

The study of Jeremiah appeared in the Expositor.; 
"The Meaning of Christmas Day" was written at 
the request of the Y.M.C.A. for distribution in the 
British Army, and it was reprinted, I understand, 
by the wish of the American Y.M.C.A. for the 
American Expeditionary Force. Two other papers 
in a somewhat different form were in a small book- 
let, once published by the Student Christian Move- 
ment under the title of Vocation, and now out of 
print. Others rest on contributions to the Nation 
and other journals, but have been completely re- 
written. Four at any rate have not been in my 
writing before. 



▼11 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Pilgrim ........ 13 

II The Making of a Prophet .... 2.2 

III An Ancient Hymn of Hate ... 40 

IV The Meaning of Christmas Day . . 51 
V The Training at Nazareth ... 61 

VI The Talents 84 

VII T^e Last Evening . 105 

VIII The Writer to the Hebrews . . . 119 

IX The Holy Spirit 143 

X The Statue of the Good Shepherd . 174 

XI The Religion of Martin Luther . . 200 

XII A Lost Article of Faith .... 221 

XIII The Study of the Bible . ...... 243 



THE PILGRIM 



THE PILGRIM 



THE PILGRIM 

The pilgrim seems to be dropping out of our re- 
ligious conceptions. There are hymn-books which 
still keep a place for pilgrim hymns, but they are 
probably not often sung, except by children. And 
we are told often enough that the sentiment is false — 
if the hymn-writer insists that he is "but a stranger 
here," it is his own fault; earth is not, as he asserts, 
"a desert drear" ; and the reference of all happiness 
to another world is unsound, and, perhaps, unchris- 
tian. On the contrary, R. L. Stevenson is a good 
deal nearer the mark : 

The world is so full of a number of things, 
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

So he wrote in the "Child's Garden of Verse," and 
the couplet stood for a poem in itself. The greater 
part of his work is to the same tune — the world 
is a good place, planned to be so by "our cheerful 
General on high," and, indeed, achieved, if you will 

13 



14 THE PILGRIM 

only have the sense "to be up and doing," and take 
the gladness of it. If you grumble: 

Bleak without and bare within, 
Such is the place that I live in, — 

he bids you look better at it; why, if nothing else, 
the very frost of winter will "make the cart-ruts 
beautiful/' and, in short, 

To make this earth our hermitage 
A cheerful and a changeful page, 
God's bright and intricate device 
Of days and seasons doth suffice. 

So the pilgrim passes out of the picture with his 
medieval trappings, sandal shoon, and shell and staff. 
He is gone, and the excursionist has taken his 
place. 

I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

That the world is a good sort of place is not, 
after all, a very novel idea — it is in the first chapter 
of Genesis curiously enough, for in general it is 
credited with being Greek rather than Hebrew. 
The Greek, we all know, lived in the beauty and 
glory of the world, and, what is more, he interpreted 
it for all time. Take, for instance, Pindar's picture 
of the baby Iamos hidden among the flowers. The 
child of a god, he is a child of shame, some would 
say; but look at him, as he lies wrapped in a cloth 
under the flowers, and mark the lavish richness of 
the colours. It is the ion, in whose rays his tender 
body is steeped (the phrase is the poet's), that 



THE PILGRIM 15 

gives him his name. Where is the shame? A 
healthy child, half-god by birth, with a heroic story, 
a god-given inheritance, heaven lying about him in 
his infancy, and a house of heroes founded ere he 
dies. A beautiful world, and full of glory — who 
has limned it better than Pindar, or loved better 
the gleam of its life and colour? And yet at the 
end Pindar strikes another note. 

ri de rts ; rl d' ov ris ; ovuas ovap apOpwiros. 

"What are we? What not? Man is a shadow of a 
dream." Curious how Greek melancholy is bound 
up with Greek love of beauty ! And the same thing 
meets us elsewhere. Spenser stands in English litera- 
ture as the poet of "the worlde's faire workeman- 
ship," and the poet haunted with the thought that 
Nothing is sure that grows on mortal ground ; 

for, when he weighs well the words of Mutabilitie, 
it causes him to loathe 

This state of life so tickle, 
And love of things so vain to cast away; 

Whose flow'ring pride, so fading and so fickle, 
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. 

It seems that, if we are not exactly pilgrims, we 
are like the horses in the chariot-race at the theatre. 
We may not be progressing, but the stage slips away 
under our feet. In fact, as the Red Queen said to 
Alice, it takes a great deal of running to stay in the 
same place. If we are not very careful, we shall 



16 THE PILGRIM 

find ourselves strangers in the most familiar scenes 
— old faces gone and new come, old ways and words 
forsaken, and new habits and new language surging 
in. We are not pilgrims, but we live in a progres- 
sion. The difference is that the pilgrim looks for- 
ward, and does it more and more eagerly, while 
we look back with growing wistfulness. 'The worlcl 
passes away," wrote the old writer; "love not the 
world." Or, if you love it, pray to die young, when 
the evil days come not, when you are not yet soli- 
tary, when men do not yet count you some queer 
relic of the past, a curiosity from an older time, 
and a time they count inferior to their own. 

Now the pilgrims werei ready for all this, for 
they were curiosities from the start. When they 
passed through this fine world and saw its houses, 
lands, trades, honours, preferments, titles, kingdoms, 
pleasures, and delights of all sort, they passed, as it 
seemed, through a lusty fair, with no mind to the 
merchandise, and without laying out so much as a 
farthing. And a great stir they made by this con- 
duct; and, as their chronicles tell us, there were 
reasons for this. First, the pilgrims were clothed 
with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the 
raiment of any that traded in the fair. The people, 
therefore, made a great gazing upon them; some said 
they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some 
that they were outlandish men. Secondly, and as 
they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise 



THE PILGRIM IT 

at their speech ; for few could understand what they 
said; they naturally spoke the language of Canaan. 
Thirdly, the pilgrims set very light by all their wares, 
and when one chanced mockingly to say, "What 
will ye buy?" they, looking gravely upon him, an- 
swered, "We buy the truth." On examination, they 
owned they were pilgrims, and strangers in the 
world, and that they were going to their own coun- 
try, which was the heavenly Jerusalem. 

So wrote John Bunyan, with an old Greek writer's 
words at the back of his mind — "These all died in 
faith, not having received the promises, but having 
seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, 
and embraced them, and confessed that they were 
strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that 
say such things declare plainly that they seek a 
country." That Greek writer, as plainly, had studied 
one yet older, who had spoken of a place above 
the heavens, of an ideal city there laid up, and of 
man as "no plant of earth but of heaven" — ovpaviov 
4>vt6v. And if Bunyan had read the "Faerie Queene," 
or even the first book of it, as Giant Despair and 
some other features might tempt us to think, his 
heavenly city has yet another link with Plato — that 
goodly City, 

That earthly tong 
Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell; 
Too high a ditty for my simple song. 
The Citty of the greate King hight it well, 
Wherein eternall peace and happinesse doth dwelL 



18 THE PILGRIM 

Anyone who will read the "Gorgias" will see how 
the men of this world called Socrates, and, no doubt, 
his wonderful pupil too, fools and bedlams, how they 
wondered at their speech ( for few could understand 
them), and how strange men thought their passion 
for Truth. How odd that a man should call this life 
a practice for death, that he should speak of a glori- 
ous vision beyond sense, and urge that our prepara- 
tion should be "seeking the Truth" — and this in 
Athens, with Aristophanes living in the next street, 
and Cleon and his successors, as practical Empire- 
builders as ever turned a nation away from virtue 
and mercy, and such fine words ! Strange, too, that 
in that city, which stood unique in all Greece for 
the intensity of its culture, and its love of beauty, 
yes, which in itself was the actual "education of all 
Greece," men should "desire a better country, that 
is, an heavenly" ! 

The pilgrim, with his foreign air, the language of 
Canaan, and the strange gaze that will have Truth, 
above all with his conviction that there is a heavenly 
reality which is his home — he is an uncomfortable 
spectacle for us. God sends sometimes rain, and 
sometimes sunshine; let us be content to take fair 
weather along with us. We like that religion best 
that will stand with the security of God's good bless- 
ings unto us ; for who can imagine, that is ruled by 
his reason, since God has bestowed upon us the good 
things of this life, but that He would have us keep 



THE PILGRIM 19 

them for His sake? And the pilgrim, the idealist, 
is for hazarding all at a clap. No, the world is not 
as bad as he thinks; our city will not be destroyed 
with fire from heaven; we have learnt better. In- 
stead of forsaking his city, why not do something 
for it ? There are many who would help. A Charity 
Organization Society would, at least, be something; 
Mr. Legality would gladly aid, and the pretty young 
man his son, Mr. Civility, would make the very ideal 
secretary. At all events, let us go quietly; let 
freedom slowly broaden down; let us mend things 
cautiously, or we may upset more than ever we can 
put right. But he says No; he will hazard all at 
a clap. He neither regards prince nor people, law 
nor custom, nor Sir Having Greedy, nor the rest of 
our nobility. And he means what he says, and 
goes armed — as strange a spectacle as Don Quixote 
— and his speech is the speech of a bedlam. His 
gaze is fixed on something far off, toward which 
he will go ; but if you ask him what he sees, it seems 
the perspective glass shook in his hand, and he could 
not look steadily — he thinks he saw something like 
a gate, and some of the glory of the place — so that, 
if you roundly tell him there is no such place, the 
best he can say is that he has heard and believes 
there is ; he does not know. This is indeed hazard- 
ing all at a clap. And yet — 

And yet who ever cared for Truth, and was not a 
stranger in a strange land, a pilgrim through shams, 



20 THE PILGRIM 

delusions, vanities, and compromises — a bedlam in 
whom every child of convention could read absurdity 
writ large? 

Who ever sought the good of his fellow-citizens, 
and did not pass, sooner or later, for a quack and 
an advertiser, or, at best, a dreamer who could only 
stammer that he thought he saw the gate, and some 
of the glory, and could not tell the way to it? 

Who ever lived, as seeing the invisible, putting his 
faith in the existence of a God, hazarding all for 
Him, and never had to face mockery and shame, and 
the hideous doubt that, at the end of it all, the 
Great Perhaps might turn out to be nothing — vacuam 
sedem et inania arcana? The bitter folly of his 
quest, who knows like the pilgrim himself? He 
must own Religion in rags, as well as when in his 
silver slippers; and stand by him, too, when bound 
in irons, as well as when he walketh the streets with 
applause — in short, he will be made the off-scouring 
of all things ; and the very sensitiveness of soul that 
has set him on this pilgrimage, leaves him doubly 
tender to pain, contempt and rejection, and to doubt 
and despair. 

The pilgrim is not gone. The moods of sentimen- 
talism, in their play upon lazy natures that will 
think nothing out, may have turned our fancies 
elsewhere; but whether we dream, in our idle way, 
of him or of something else, he is treading our 
streets the same as ever, clad in a garb of his own, 



THE PILGRIM 21 

the strange speech on his lips, his gaze strained 
afar, and yet curiously keen in seeing through what 
is near. The real, the eternal, the spiritual — there 
is an appeal in them that Vanity Fair does not un- 
derstand, nor Mr. Worldly Wiseman and a great 
many more respectable citizens, nor again many of 
those Greeks of whom we talk so much, perhaps not 
Pindar himself at heart. But as Wordsworth tells 
us, "the immortal mind craves objects that endure" ; 
and it was made for them and finds no rest till 
it rest among them with their Author and its own. 
No, the pilgrim is not gone; he is still seeking the 
Celestial City — that kingdom of Heaven which has 
cost the world so many good lives, the way to which 
is marked by a cross for every milestone, and which 
mankind will not have at any price, and yet knows 
in its heart it must have. 



II 

THE MAKING OF A PROPHET * 

One of the most profitable studies is to know the 
man to whom a call to some high task has come, 
and to find out, if he lets us so far into his heart, 
how it came to him. Where the call of God is heard 
by a man with any measure of obedience, there can 
seldom be for long any great doubt as to the history 
of it. Sometimes he will tell it us himself, vividly 
and directly, as Isaiah tells how he "saw the Lord 
sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train 
filled the temple" (Isaiah vi.). But that is not the 
whole story, for if we ask who was this man to 
whom this vision came, and why should he have had 
it rather than anyone else, we are involved in a 
good many questions. If we can find the answers 
to them, we shall be in a position better to under- 
stand how God deals with men — how, historically, 
He has dealt with men; and when we understand 
that, we may find that He has had dealings with us 
ourselves, the significance of which we did not see. 

It is perhaps rather a risky thing to enter on such 

a I have to thank Dr Theodore H. Robinson, Lecturer in 
'Hebrew at University College, Cardiff, for reading this paper, 
and for his criticism. 

22 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 23 

inquiries when one is dependent on translations and 
is not at home in the vernacular spoken by the man 
we study. But I begin to think that a foreign speech 
is never fully mastered, however long one reads it ; — 
do we know our own ? And again, when a thought 
reaches a certain elevation, it may lose something in 
translation — a great deal perhaps — and yet reveal a 
great soul in awful simplicity. "And His will is our 
peace" — that is, even in a foreign prose, a thought 
of power and wonder, and it speaks, for those who 
will hear, of a spiritual experience of no common 
kind. Without Italian, we shall not know Dante to 
the full; but we can know something worth while 
of the greater sort of man from even a very little 
of him. One of Shakespeare's most famous women 
speaks thirty lines only in the course of the play. 
So, if we recognize that we are to lose something, 
we may also fairly claim that we do not lose all; 
when we read so living a man as Jeremiah in trans- 
lation. 

He tells us a little about himself and his ante- 
cedents. He was "the son of Hilkiah, of the priests 
that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin' ' 
(i. i), a member by birth of a priestly caste, which 
does not always imply much religion but which some- 
times explains reaction against a priestly view of 
religion and of God. The episode of his purchase 
of land (ch. xxxii.) seems to suggest that he was a 
man of some means. He further tells us (xvi. 2) 



24 THE PILGRIM 

that he did not marry. The rest of his story must 
be gathered from the things of which he speaks and 
the way in which he speaks of them. 

It has been remarked of our Lord and St. Paul, 
that it is plain from their speech that the one was 
country-bred and the other a man of municipalities 
— "a citizen of no mean city/' he says himself. The 
same contrast would appear to hold between Jere- 
miah and Ezekiel. Similes from nature are frequent 
in all literature, but there are differences in the 
way in which men use them. Our Lord always 
confined himself to the real and the actual, and so 
does Jeremiah; and there is a certain likeness in 
their use of country things and country ways, though 
Jeremiah does not employ the parable-form with 
anything approaching the supremacy we find in the 
Gospels. But contrast him with Ezekiel. The eagle, 
with great wings and long pinions, full of feathers, 
which comes to Lebanon and carries off the topmost 
of the young twigs of a cedar and sets it in a city 
of merchants in a land of traffic (Ezek. xvii. 2-8), — 
the other cedar, under whose shadow "dwelt all na- 
tions" (Ezek. xxxi. 6), — and the lioness with the 
wonderful whelps (Ezek. xix. 1-9), leave nature a 
long way behind ; and we are perhaps right in think- 
ing that men who have lived close to nature take 
fewer liberties with her. Ezekiel draws his imagery 
less from nature than from Babylonian art. Jere- 
miah's references to country life, to the farm, the 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 25 

animals wild and tame, the daily round of labours 
and anxieties, and the wonder and beauty of nature, 
surely have something to tell us of a sentient spirit, 
for whom all these things were familiar and were 
dear. The examples of Virgil, and Wordsworth, 
and Tennyson, of Jesus himself, prompt the thought 
that Jeremiah's instinctive recurrence to country 
scenes and doings whenever he wishes an illustration 
that will reach the heart and make the matter clear 
and living, points to boyhood and its impressions. 

It is wonderful how many sides of country life he 
touches — perhaps he would have been surprised to 
be told it himself. There is the vineyard, with the 
"noble vine, wholly a right seed," and "the degene- 
rate plant of a strange vine" (ii. 21), and the grape- 
gatherer (vi. 9). 1 There is the olive; and here we 
may pause to note a certain deliberate use of the 
adjective, not idle at all, which suggests feeling and 
gives a hint of the man's style — "a green olive tree, 
fair with goodly fruit" (xi. 16) — and we may com- 
pare the question "where is the flock, that was given 
thee, thy beautiful flock?" (xiii. 20). There is the 
cornfield of course. "What is the straw to the 
wheat? saith the Lord" (xxiii. 28). That is not 
quite the Lord's dialect when He speaks with the 
city-bred. One of his most haunting phrases turns 

1 1 omit other references in chapters xlix. to li., as the 
ascription of the chapters to Jeremiah is questioned, but they 
too contain interesting pictures — the vineyard (xlix. 9) ; the 
lion (xlix. 19, 20, li. 38) ; the scattered sheep (1. 17) ; the 
eagle (xlix. 16). 



26 THE PILGRIM 

on harvest — "The harvest is past, the summer is 
ended, and we are not saved" (viii. 20). He thinks 
of a harvest much earlier than ours in a more genial 
latitude. After harvest the preparations begin for 
next year and new cattle are broken in — Ephraim, 
he says, is "chastised, as a calf unaccustomed to the 
yoke" (xxxi. 18). 

As the boy grows, he ranges further afield — with 
the fowler after the birds — "they watch," he says of 
the wicked, "as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, 
they catch men" (v. 26). He studies the birds — 
"the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed 
times ; and the turtle and the swallow and the crane 
observe the time of their coming" (viii. 7) ; as to 
the partridge (xvii. 11) it is suggested that he de- 
pends here on a legend of the countryside, as White 
of Selborne followed the popular tale of the swal- 
lows lying congealed together under ponds in winter. 
Or perhaps he wandered with the shepherds — 
stretched the tent with them and set up the curtains 
(x. 20; vi. 3) ; and later on he looked back to the 
desert life and wished he could have it again (ix. 2). 
He told the flocks with them (xxxiii. 13), and grew 
into acquaintance with the wild beasts, notably the 
lion. The jackal, perhaps referred to in iv. 17 as 
the watcher of the fields, the leopard (xiii. 23) 
and the wild ass * (ii. 24) we can believe, had all 

1 The text appears doubtful. The Greek of the LXX. shows 
considerable variation. 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 27 

their interest, and the wildest and most dangerous 
of all the desert-dwellers no less — "by the ways hast 
thou sat for them, as an Arab in the wilderness" 
(iii. 2). 

But apart from the living creatures, 

The earth 
And common face of Nature spoke to him 
Rememberable things. 1 

There is the great drought — "because of the ground 
which is chapt, for that no rain hath been in the land, 
the plowmen are ashamed, they cover their heads. 
Yea, the hind also in the field calveth and forsaketh 
her young, because there is no grass. And the wild 
asses stand on the bare heights, they pant for air 
like jackals ; their eyes fail, because there is no herb- 
age" (xiv. 4-6). That passage shows the man — the 
keen observation, the memory, the short, quick, tell- 
ing phrase, and the picture, alive with truth and 
imagination. There is the "[hot] wind from the 
bare heights in the wilderness" (iv. 11), and in tell- 
ing contrast we read: "Shall the snow of Lebanon 
fail from the rock of the field? or shall the cold 
waters that flow down from afar be dried up?" 
(xviii. 14). "Are there any among the vanities of 
the heathen that can cause rain? or can the heavens 
give showers? art not thou He, O Lord our God?" 
(xiv. 22). There is the constant and familiar mys- 
1 "Prelude," i. 586. 



28 THE PILGRIM 

tery of day and night — "the shadows of the evening 
are stretched out" (vi. 4) and "the host of heaven 
that cannot be numbered" (xxxiii. 22) rise over 
the boy in the shepherds' camp, and the sense for 
God grows. Then back into the village to watch the 
potter busy at his wheel (xviii. 1-4), and the metal- 
worker (x. 4, 9) and the bellows blowing fiercely 
(vi. 29), the mud field-oven, familiar still in the 
East and elsewhere (i. 13). It is, in short, a boy- 
hood like Wordsworth's in close touch with objects 
that endure. 

From what has been said, it will take little insight 
to infer a meditative temperament. There is a 
reflective cast about him from the start, tinged with 
melancholy. He is given to introspection, and life 
with many moods lacks ease. Popular talk has 
'exaggerated — grossly — his weeping and his tears, 
and the impression has been strengthened by the 
ascription to him of Lamentations. His contem- 
poraries saw another Jeremiah — "a man of strife 
and a man of contention to the whole land" (xv. 10). 
He turns things over and over — "Thy words were 
found and I did eat them ; and thy words were unto 
me a joy and the rejoicing of mine heart: for I am 
called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts. I sat not 
in the assembly of them that make merry, nor re- 
joiced. I sat alone because of thy hand; for thou 
hast filled me with indignation" (xv. 16, 17). He 
looks into his own heart — "pained at my very heart; 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 29 

my heart is disquieted within me" (iv. 19), — and, 
like other men who look within, he is shocked and 
troubled at what he finds, for "the heart is deceitful 
above all things, and it is desperately sick ; who can 
know it?" and he answers, only God (xvii. 9). 
"O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in him- 
self: it is not in man that walketh to direct his 
steps. O Lord, correct me" (x. 23, 24). As he 
grew to know better the life of his people — the hope- 
lessness of effort to help or guide them — the inevi- 
table doom descending on them, which he was to 
share — it is easy to understand how melancholy 
grew upon him (viii. 18; ix. 1), and how he wished 
he had never been born (xx. 14) ; but even before 
all this, the seeds of disquiet were with him. 

A striking trait in his character is the extraor- 
dinary frankness with which, deeply pious as he is, 
he challenges God to explain Himself — "Righteous 
art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet I 
would reason the cause with thee; wherefore doth 
the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all 
they at ease that deal very treacherously?" (xii. 2). 
A similar question is asked by Theognis and other 
Greeks, but with them it is not a matter of religion. 
The Zeus to whom they address their inquiry is not 
the personal Jehovah of Jeremiah. The sensitive 
nature, coming gradually into the knowledge of the 
badness and rottenness of human character and 
human life, suffers acutely; the times are out of 



30 THE PILGRIM 

joint — there is so much to explain, and to endure; 
and the prophet (not yet at all conscious of any 
prophetic gifts or call) cannot explain and cannot 
bear, for he has not in himself the power to do 
either. Such a man, as he sees later on, is not the 
type needed for a prophet, yet God calls him, and we 
after the event see why. It is the sensitive nature, 
for which things are unendurable and unintelligible, 
that sees and reads the problem true. He, of all 
men, has the best chance to know, for he feels the 
irreconcilable elements that other men miss, and 
cannot rest with them in a peace that is no peace. 
Finally it has to be remembered that the clue which 
later Judaism found to unravel the mystery of pain 
and failure upon earth was not in Jeremiah's hand; 
he has no doctrine of personal immortality — a 
strange fact, when we realize the grasp he had of 
God and man as personalities. 

This then is our man, but now we reach a place 
where there is a gap in our story. With this type 
it is never easy to know where and when they be- 
come conscious of God — even when they tell us. For 
God is with them, and as they go they have, in 
George Fox's phrase, "great openings." Things 
stand out in a new way — they see — and all before 
seems dim by comparison. This happens again and 
again. When further, as in the case of Jeremiah, 
we depend on a book notoriously confused and un- 
certain in text and order, as the Septuagint transla- 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 31 

tion sufficiently shows, a book about the writing 
of which we can never pronounce definitely how 
much the prophet wrote or Baruch or others, we 
cannot get very far with a narative. But we find 
sooner or later a man with an unspeakable con- 
sciousness of God. "Am I a God at hand, saith the 
Lord, and not a God afar off. Can any hide in 
the secret places that I shall not see him? saith the 
Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the 
Lord" (xxiii. 2$, 24). God, near and far, and 
filling all things — it is the knowledge of all the 
mystics. How can there be other gods? And yet 
the prophet's people neither see nor feel. "Hath a 
nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods? 
but my people have changed their glory for that 
which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, 
at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, 
saith the Lord" (ii. 11, 12), for over these very 
heavens God's people have set another. "Seest thou 
not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the 
streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, 
and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women 
knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of 
heaven" (vii. 17, 18). Thus from childhood the 
minds of his people were being steeped in falsity, 
and years after in Egypt the women said that so 
long as they had burnt incense to the queen of heaven 
they had "plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw 
no evil," and things had gone wrong since they left 



32 THE PILGRIM 

off (xliv. 18). There were other renunciations of 
God, too — "for according to the number of thy 
cities are thy gods, O Judah; and according to the 
number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up 
altars to the shameful thing, even altars to burn in- 
cense unto Baal" (xi. 13). Here we have the be- 
ginning of the call — in the dreadful contrast be- 
tween God and No-gods, between the prophet's 
sense of God's nearness and wonder, and the people 
who turned their back to God, and not their face 
(ii. 27). 

The prophet looked out on the world around ; the 
vision of God does not dull the eyes of understand- 
ing. No, with keener gaze he looked and he saw 
other nations — armies and kings and great powers — 
danger ever nearer. But no one else saw it. Poor 
and great alike are under delusion; false to God, 
false to one another, delusion has come upon them. 
Their very confidence in God is false. Isaiah had 
foretold the safety of Jerusalem from Sennacherib; 
plenty of new Isaiahs foretold in the same strain 
her safety from Nebuchadnezzar. It was in vain; 
God's thoughts were other. "Amend your ways and 
your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this 
place (or, I will dwell with you). Trust ye not in 
lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the 
temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these" 
(vii. 3, 4). The temple had been saved before, this 
time it would not be. God asked righteousness, but 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 33 

they were satisfied without it. But the place is full 
of prophets of peace — saying, "I have dreamed, I 
have dreamed" (xxiii. 25); and "they have healed 
also the hurt of my people lightly, saying, Peace, 
peace; when there is no peace" (vi. 14; viii. 11). 
The "hurt" here is a breakage not to be healed by 
words. "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the 
priests bear rule by their means; and my people 
love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end 
thereof?" (v. 31). And God has heard what the 
prophets have said that prophesy lies in His name 
(xxiii, 25). 

The call comes to a point. The situation grows 
intolerable — false peace, real danger, rejection of 
God, rejection by God, captivity — "and my people 
love to have it so!" Then Jeremiah hears God 
speaking, and speaking to him personally. It does 
not matter whether the conversation took a moment 
or six months — it came. "Before I formed thee in 
the belly I knew thee, and before thou earnest out of 
the womb I sanctified thee; I have appointed thee 
a prophet unto the nations" (i. 5). This is indeed 
a dreadful outcome of the realization of God — this 
awful charge — to be a prophet — to quit field and 
quiet, to speak of God and His judgments to men 
who will not listen, when one is a man, sensitive, 
shrinking, and uneasy. God must have chosen the 
wrong man. "Then said I, Ah, Lord God ! behold, 



34 THE PILGRIM 

I cannot speak, for I am a child. 1 But the Lord 
said unto me, Say not, I am a child : for to whomso- 
ever I shall send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever 
I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of 
their faces : for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith 
the Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand, and 
touched my mouth, and the Lord said unto me, 
Behold I have put my words in thy mouth. . . . Gird 
up thy loins, and arise and speak unto them all that 
I command thee : be not dismayed at their faces, lest 
I dismay thee in their sight. For, behold, I have 
made thee this day a de fenced city, and an iron 
pillar, and brazen walls, against the kings of Judah, 
against the princes thereof, against the priests there- 
of, and against the people of the land. And they 
shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail 
against thee ; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to 
deliver thee." 

"Peace, peace," when there was no peace, was 
the message of the false prophet. Jeremiah's mes- 
sage was to be judgment, the destruction of temple 
and tower, captivity in a strange land and no speedy 
return. And when the false prophet promised a 
short exile, Jeremiah had to write and give his 
countrymen a strange message from God — to settle 
down, to marry and multiply, "and seek the peace 
of the city whither I have caused you to be carried 

*By "child" he means that he has never had responsibility; 
he is not a person whose words will naturally carry weight. 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 35 

away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it ; for in 
the peace thereof shall ye have peace" (xxix. 6, 7) ; 
for they were to be there seventy years. So far 
every word of God that He puts in Jeremiah's mouth 
is a word of terror and pain. No man would wish 
to speak them — least of all such a man. And yet 
he could not help it. That we learn from the burn- 
ing utterance that follows the conflict with Pashhur 
(ch. xx.). Here we have to remember the con- 
temporary belief that God would receive a man to 
his damnation. The very word used by Jeremiah 
is employed by Ezekiel (xiv. 9), "if the prophet 
be deceived and speaketh a word, I the Lord have 
deceived that prophet and I will stretch out my hand 
upon him and will destroy him/' and in the story 
told to Ahab by Micaiah (2 Kings xxii. 19-23)., 
Jeremiah has become charged with words from God, 
and finds, or thinks he finds, that God does not 
fulfil them. It is the most terrible mood that a 
sensitive nature can experience. "O Lord," cries 
the prophet (xx. 7) after his public exhibition in 
the stocks, "thou hast deceived me and I was de- 
ceived ; thou are stronger than I, and hast prevailed ; 
I am become a laughing-stock all the day, every 
one mocketh me. For as often as I speak, I cry out; 
I cry, Violence and spoil : because the word of the 
Lord is made a reproach unto me, and a derision, all 
the day. And if I say, I will not make mention of 
him, or speak any more in his name, then there is 



36 THE PILGRIM 

in mine heart as it were a burning fire, shut up in 
my bones, and I am weary with forbearing and I 
cannot contain." Such words need no comment — 
they are true of every prophet, every poet, every 
man to whom God speaks; there is nothing for it 
but to speak what is given, and at last the given 
word comes out almost of itself. 

Even yet we have hardly got the whole of the call, 
but we have seen certain elements of it — the con- 
sciousness of God and the sense of the all-importance 
of the God-directed life — the contrast offered by the 
nation's indifference to God, their need of God and 
their danger — the summons to speak, coupled with 
reluctance and a deep feeling of unfitness, — the 
growing, burning inevitableness of obedience — and 
somehow the conviction that God, Who fills earth 
and heaven, Who picks His man before he is born, 
must go with His messenger. Pain there will be — 
endless conflict with the men of his nation, prophet 
and priest and king — contumely, stocks and dun- 
geon — and, at last deportation — a long record of 
failure. The brazen wall and iron pillar, the man of 
strife and contention (as they called him), stout, 
dauntless and impenetrable — they little knew how 
he quivered and tingled and suffered. The promise 
was fulfilled to the letter that he should be like a 
"brazen wall" ; whatever his inward moods, revealed 
to us in his writings, his countrymen saw in him a 
man of brass, neither to be intimidated nor cajoled. 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 37 

At last he has to tell Israel that not only is God 
entirely independent of them and their worship, but 
that God is utterly done with them : "I have sworn 
by my great name, saith the Lord, that my name 
shall no more be in the mouth of any man of 
Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, As the Lord 
God liveth (i.e. God will no longer be the God 
they swear by; he will no longer be their God at 
all). Behold, I watch over them for evil and not for 
good. . . . They shall know whose word shall stand, 
mine or theirs" (xliv. 26, 27, 28). The message 
was a hard one — doubly hard when it had to be 
given against his own people, when it bore the look 
of disloyalty and bad patriotism — and he gave it 
at all costs. 

But then because he is obedient and risks every- 
thing on God, he is given a still deeper insight into 
God's nature and God's ways. They have turned the 
back to God and not the face, though He has sent 
prophet after prophet, "rising up early and sending 
them" (vii. 13), — so God is to be frustrate of His 
purpose? Is He? "Then came the word of the 
Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold I am the Lord, 
the God of all flesh; is there anything too hard for 
me ?" (xxxii. 26, 27) . God's message given through 
Jeremiah has failed, — not altogether, for there were 
some who listened and remembered and wrote down 
his words — but in the main it had failed, and God is 



38 THE PILGRIM 

beaten? It is early to say that. No, God is not 
likely to be beaten — hardly that. Then? 

By and by the prophet, despised and rejected 
along with his God, penetrates farther into the 
secrets of God. God's love of Israel and God's re- 
jection by Israel meet, as it were (in Bunyan's 
phrase), in his soul; and which will prove stronger? 
"The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, 
I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (xxxi. 
3). If God's love is on the same scale as His other 
attributes, it will be as eternal as God Himself; it 
will in the long run prevail over Israel, and will 
achieve its purpose. A new Israel, ransomed and 
redeemed from the hand of him that is stronger 
than he, shall come back from captivity, "and they 
shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall 
flow together unto the goodness of the Lord . . . 
and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, 
saith the Lord" (xxxi. 11-14). But it will be a 
changed Israel, and the change will be an inward 
one. "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that 
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, 
and with the house of Judah. ... I will put my law 
in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write 
it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my 
people ; and they shall teach no more every man his 
neighbour and every man his brother, saying, Know 
the Lord [the sorry task of the prophet himself] : 
for they shall all know me from the least of them 



THE MAKING OF A PROPHET 39 

unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord ; for I will 
forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember 
no more" (xxxi. 31-34). The insight here is amaz- 
ing — hundreds of years later the infant Christian 
church saw the meaning of the passage and took it, 
and gave the name of "New Covenant' ' to the book 
that told the story of God in Christ reconciling the 
world to Himself. The instinct that seized the quo- 
tation was sound; but how came the thought to 
Jeremiah? Surely by obedience to God's call. 

God has many ways of calling men ; but when side 
by side a man grows conscious of the love of God 
in Christ, with all it means of freedom and peace, 
and of the darkness of the heathen world, given over 
to gods that are no gods, and all they involve of 
falsity, cruelty, and lust — or when, in short, he rea- 
lizes the distance between the actual and the ideal in 
any sphere — is it not legitimate to suggest that in 
such a contrast there lies a call for him also, and 
that, if he obeys, he too will enter into new knowl- 
edge of the love of God and of God's purposes? 



Ill 

AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 

Sometimes one opens an old book and a leaf of 
writing will flutter out — a letter written perhaps a 
hundred years ago or more, a letter that tells of pas- 
sionate feeling, and gives one a glimpse of some 
great moment in the life of a man or woman for- 
gotten, whose very name may have perished. There 
is something moving in thus stepping into the ex- 
perience of another, seeing the eye flash, the lip 
quiver for a moment, and then realizing that this 
intensity of suffering or joy was long ago — long ago, 
and yet living still — and the rest silence. 

There is just such a document in the Book o£ 
Psalms. Look at this : 

By the waters of Babylon, 
There we sat down, yea, we wept, 
When we remembered Zion. 
Upon the willows in the midst thereof 
We hanged our harps. 

For there they that led us captive required of us songs, 
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, 
Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 
How shall we sing the Lord's song 
In a strange land? 
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
Let my right hand forget her cunning. 
40 



AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 41 

Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, 

If I remember thee not; 

If I prefer not Jerusalem 

Above my chief joy. 

Remember, O Lord, against the children of Edom 

The day of Jerusalem; 

Who said, Rase it, rase it, 

Even to the foundation thereof. 

O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed, 

Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee 

As thou hast served us, 

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones 

Against the rock. 

There is hardly so vivid a bit in the Old Testament 
itself, full as it is with gleams from the life of man. 
Look at the story of this unknown writer. He has 
seen the Babylonian come in appalling strength and 
sweep conquering through Palestine, from Damas- 
cus down to Jerusalem. There followed a siege, 
and then the city was captured, and the Babylonians 
marched in and sacked Jerusalem. There was un- 
bridled ruthlessness about these conquerors from the 
Euphrates, which went beyond what is usually con- 
ceded to modern armies. A number of the better 
families of the Jews were gathered to be transported 
to the other side of the world. The sickly were left 
to their fate ; needless infants in arms were disposed 
of, the psalmist tells us how. That savage cry at 
the end of his Hymn of Hate is a revelation; it was 
his own child that he had seen so treated. With his 
friends and fellow-citizens he was marched north- 
wards, following more or less the route of General 



42 THE PILGRIM 

Allenby. There is no other way from Jerusalem to 
Babylon; those who have tramped northward 
through Syria will best understand what that march 
was like. At the point where the Euphrates most 
closely approaches the Mediterranean they crossed 
the desert and marched eternally down the banks of 
that great river. The journey was long and tedious, 
but the fatigue and the hardship had this advantage, 
they kept men from thinking. At last they reached 
the place where they were to live, where their graves 
and the graves of their children are found to this 
day — Nippur. The journey was over, and they were 
in a new land. People have spoken of the pathos of 
seeing the emigrants embark at Liverpool for a new 
world ; but at least they embark in hope, and one who 
has seen it feels a greater pathos in their disembark- 
ation as immigrants at Quebec or Ellis Island. The 
promised land does not flow with milk and honey 
on the landing-stage. 

Arrived in Babylonia, and sitting by the riverside, 
there is talk among the prisoners and their guards, 
for even Babylonians were human, and as they sit 
the Babylonians sing songs of their own land. By 
and by in a friendly spirit someone asks the Hebrew 
captives if they, too, will not sing. One of the hap- 
piest stories of our late war, whether it is true or 
not, describes a sing-song in an English trench, and 
then an English soldier says, addressing two prison- 
ers : "Our friends Hans and Fritz will now oblige 



AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 43 

with the Hymn of Hate." The story does not say 
what Hans and Fritz did; but one of the greater and 
finer features of the war was surely this, that, once 
made prisoners, they were among friends; their 
country was not destroyed, there was no sacked Jeru- 
salem away behind them, no murdered children; 
there was detention, and then a safe return for them. 

But for the Jew in Babylonia everything was dif- 
ferent. There was no Jerusalem, there was no home, 
there was no return, there was no child ; the child lay 
with its head dashed upon the rock where the ruins 
of the home stood, and dogs and birds had picked its 
bones. Nor was this all. "How shall we sing the 
Lord's song," he asks, "in a strange land?" For, 
like many of the ancients, he seems to have held the 
view that gods, like kings and princes, had their 
frontiers, within which they might be omnipotent, 
but outside of which they had no power. David 
himself said to Saul : "If it be the children of men 
that have stirred thee up against me, cursed be they 
before Jehovah; for they have driven me out this 
day that I should have no share in the inheritance 
of Jehovah, saying, 'Go, serve other gods' " ( I Sam. 
xxvi. 19). 

The Babylonian soldier thought that it would be 
interesting to hear a Hebrew melody, to enjoy for a 
moment the contrast of the strange tune, even if he 
did not understand the words. But he got no song. 
The whole nature of the poet rose up quivering with 



44 THE PILGRIM 

pain. He left the group by the waters of Babylon, 
he broke away from them, and out of the sorrow that 
surged through him he wrote a new song altogether, 
full of tears and memories, culminating in this crash 
of hatred — the one great authentic Hymn of Hate in 
the Bible. People speak of the cursing Psalms ; there 
is none of them with the concentrated, definite, dis- 
tilled intensity of this. And so far as we know any- 
thing of the poet, there is the end of the story. Who 
he was, we do not know; what became of him, we 
do not know. We only know that he had gone into 
exile, and that, whether his life was long or short, 
in exile he died. Was he among those to whom the 
prophet Jeremiah wrote the terrible letter from Jeru- 
salem ? 

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto 
all the captivity, whom I have caused to be carried away- 
captive from Jerusalem unto Babylon: Build ye houses, 
and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit 
of them; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters, 
and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters 
to husbands, that they may bear sons, and daughters, and 
multiply ye there, and be not diminished. And seek the 
peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried 
away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the 
peace thereof shall ye have peace. For thus saith the 
Lord, After seventy years be accomplished for Babylon 
I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, 
in causing you to return to this place. For I know the 
thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts 
of peace and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter 
end (Jeremiah xxix.). 

Think of the feelings with which he heard the 
letter. The exile was to be for seventy years. He 



AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 45 

would never return. If any of his should return, it 
would be his grandchildren, the third generation; 
and he is to pray for the peace of Babylon! To 
pray for the peace of Babylon — and he is exulting 
in the hope that somehow, some day, she may be 
destroyed, and he has prayed for blessing on the man 
who will kill the babies of the Babylonians as the 
Babylonians killed his child. Pray for the peace of 
Babylon ! 

However, it came to the seventy years. There the 
exiles were, and there they had to stay. It was not 
till Cyrus conquered Babylon that the Jews were 
allowed to return. But it was not the same Israel 
that went into exile that returned to Jerusalem. It 
has been suggestively said that Israel went into exile 
a nation and returned a church. Unlike the Bour- 
bons of the nineteenth century, Israel in exile learnt 
some things and forgot others. Whether it was ac- 
cident or genius that made the order of the Psalms, 
it is significant to find in the 139th a measure of the 
distance that was really travelled in religious ex- 
perience. "How shall we sing Jehovah's song in a 
strange land?" asks the earlier poet in exile. The 
question of the later poet (later by some centuries) 
is quite different : 

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there : 

If I take the wings of the morning, 



46 THE PILGRIM 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 

If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, 

And the light about me shall be night; 

Even the darkness hideth not from thee, 

But the night shineth as the day; 

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 

Israel had gone into the uttermost parts of the 
earth, and had found that even there Jehovah's hand 
had led him, Jehovah's right hand had held him. 
Israel had learned that there is no land outside the 
range of God, that God is near all the lands, and is 
in all the lands, that he was as near to Jehovah by 
the waters of Babylon, as by cool Siloam's shady rill, 
and the Lord's hand was not shortened. In Babylon 
itself Jehovah had searched him and known him. 
But the later poet goes further in thought than the 
wings of the morning can bear him ; he goes beyond 
the uttermost parts of the sea; he realizes (strangest 
of all) that in the grave itself God will be waiting 
for him. To the Hebrew the world of the dead was a 
dim, sad, gloomy place, all but without light and 
life. The most vivid picture given of it is in Isaiah's 
forecast of the fallen King of Babylon : 

Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy 
coming : it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief 
ones of the earth ; it hath raised up from their thrones all 
the kings of the nations. 

All they shall answer and say unto thee, Art thou become 
weak as we ? Art thou become like unto us ? Thy pomp 
is brought down to hell, and the noise of thy viols: the 
worm is spread under thee, and worms cover thee. 



AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 47 

How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of 
the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, 
which didst lay low the nations ! And thou saidst in thine 
heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne 
above the stars of God; ... I will ascend above the 
heights of the clouds: I will be like the Most High. Yet 
thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the uttermost parts 
of the pit. 

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, they 
shall consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made 
the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, that made 
the world as a wilderness, and overthrew the cities there- 
of ; that let not loose his prisoners to their home? (Isaiah 
xiv. 9-17). 

It was long before Israel included in its faith a really 
definite conviction of personal immortality. The 
poet of the 139th Psalm is one of the forerunners 
of this belief. "If I make my bed in Sheol, in the 
world of the dead, behold Thou art there." What a 
glowing presentment of the range and power of 
God ! Down among the dead men in the dimness of 
Sheol, he finds Jehovah who has searched him and 
known him, who knew him before he was born, and 
is with him still. 

The documents at which we have been looking are 
all genuine expressions of human experience; every 
accent, every note, every line is written, as it were, 
in heart's blood ; and we see what it has cost to travel 
the distance between the two poets. We look back 
and we ask : "What was the meaning of the agony 
and misery of the earlier poet?" and we get the an- 
swer in the quiet happy faith of the later poet. Was 
it worth while, that deluge of disaster, those seventy 



48 THE PILGRIM 

years of exile? What has mankind to say in an- 
swer ? Could we forgo the gain that Israel made in 
those years of suffering and hope deferred? Not 
We feel that it has worked out aright, at any rate, 
so far as mankind is concerned; we owe something 
to this poet by the waters of Babylon. And we sum 
up our conclusion as our own poets have summed it 
up — "Knowledge by suffering entereth" — "Our 
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest 
thought." So it is again and again in the history of 
man ; tragedy and pain, and nothing to do but quietly 
work through them, and the issue is peace to those 
who come after the sufferers, for whom they do their 
suffering and their thinking. Once this is realized, 
men find a new value, a new reality in suffering. It 
ceases to be mockery when it becomes intelligible; 
and some of the deepest natures will not wish to 
forgo it, if their suffering will produce such results 
for those they love, for those who are to come after 
them. 

But what of the earlier poet and his unlightened 
pain, his anguish in the darkness ? He sees no solu- 
tion, and his pain is the more for his seeing none. 
But the later poet makes it clear that even he was 
not outside the range and knowledge of God, for 
sooner or later, whether in the uttermost parts of the 
earth, or in the world of the dead itself, he would 
know the touch and the face of Jehovah, and learn 
the explanation and be satisfied. 



AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE 49 

"How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange 
land?'' The strange land may be the old familiar 
home made strange for ever by a vacant place, by 
the estrangement of those dear to us, or by the com- 
ing of new thoughts that raise questions and seem 
to leave no place for God. Most men and women 
sooner or later know this exile, have to live in this 
strange land. 

Our two old Hebrew poems give us the clue to find 
our way in the strange land which it may fall to us 
to travel. "Pray for the peace of the land," and do 
the ordinary duties of life, build up the home, care 
for the children, make friends with the Babylonians 
themselves ; the most commonplace duties come first, 
and in the doing of them comes the realization of the 
prophet's promises fulfilled. "I know the thoughts 
that I think towards you/' saith the Lord, "thoughts 
of peace and not of evil, to give you hope in your 
latter end." "Ye shall seek me and find me, and 
when ye shall search for me with all your heart, I 
will be found of you, and I will turn your captivity" 
(Jeremiah xxix. n, 13, 14). 

Such is the story of the Old Testament, and the 
New Testament, as ever, gives it new value, and 
raises it to a higher point. It tells of one hanging 
on a cross, who cries in agony, "My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me?" and dies without an 
answer from heaven. The New Testament also 
shows us the conviction of thousands that God was 



50 THE PILGRIM 

never more in earnest, never nearer, than when His 
Son hung upon the cross. "My peace I leave with 
you, my peace I give unto you" : so they tell us Jesus 
said, and they were speaking from their experience. 
In the cross men find peace with God, and that means 
peace with men. There are no more hymns of hate ; 
there is instead a New Song, and, as a New Testa- 
ment poet says, it is sung by men of all nations and 
kindreds and peoples and tongues ; the burden of it is 
thanksgiving and the keynote is joy. 



THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY 

Everybody knows what Christmas Day is. We 
know it so well that we do not think about it. But 
it often repays us to think about the things that we 
know best, and without embarking on Theology we 
may say that Christmas Day commemorates the 
birth of the most interesting man known to history. 

If it is objected that we have no means of know- 
ing when he really was born, we can admit that at 
once. It was not till the middle of the Fourth Cen- 
tury that December 25th was chosen for the com- 
memoration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The day 
had its own associations; it was a Roman festival 
time when, for a few days, all slaves were free and 
their own masters. It was also over a large part of 
the world kept as "The Day of the UncO'NQuered 
Sun." There was a widespread worship of the Sun ; 
and, after the shortest day of the year and the dark 
days round about it, the growth of the Sun's light 
is evident on December 25th, and the day was kept 
as the birthday of the Sun. Not a bad day after all 
on which to remember the birth of Jesus, a day as- 

51 



52 THE PILGRIM 

sociated with freedom, the day that celebrates the 
birth of light. 

This man's birth has meant both freedom and 
light to mankind, and it is worth while to let our 
minds rest on what he has done, on what he has 
meant to men. 

Jesus stands for the God-centred life. There 
never was anyone for whom God was so real, for 
whom God was so near, and this sense of his for 
God lies at the very heart of all that he has done in 
bringing men freedom and light. It was not that he 
did not know the darkness and the limitations of or- 
dinary life. As we read his story we can see that his 
was no easy life. If he believed in God it was not 
for want of knowledge of hell. He lived in a land 
enslaved by foreigners ; he was a carpenter, he was 
poor. One of the early Fathers of the Church re- 
minded the Christian rich that the Lord Jesus 
brought no silver footbath from heaven. He had to 
work for a widowed mother, for little brothers and 
sisters ; he knew the tragedy of the money being lost, 
and the joy when it was found. He knew how hard 
it is to keep children in food and clothes, how fast 
they wear their clothes out, and how the time comes 
when clothes can be patched no more. He lived in a 
little town which, like other little towns, had its 
stories of squalor and pain, of broken lives, of 
prodigal sons, of oppression and tyranny. We can 
see in his story that he knew our problems, that he 



THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY 53 

knew above all where they hurt. "He suffered," we 
read in the New Testament, and it tells us what he 
did suffer — conflict of mind, temptation, repudia- 
tion; betrayal. The story is summed up as agony. 
All these things he knew, the commonplace troubles 
of ordinary people, the soul-destroying tragedies that 
from time to time break down the best and most 
beautiful spirits. He knew life, and he had the in- 
tellectual habit of taking the incidents of life with- 
out an anaesthetic, the hero's way of facing what 
is to be borne with open eyes and unflinching. 

This man brings home to us, both by his teaching 
and by the story of his life, the possibility of real 
contact with God, not in mere moments of exalta- 
tion, but in the steady, sober business of life, in its 
enjoyments, in its sorrows, and in the happiness 
which we take without noticing. For him the centre 
of everything is God. God is not for him a vague 
abstract noun; he never defines God as if God were 
a problem in philosophy. But he lives on the basis 
of God, in the presence of God; he accepts God as 
a child accepts the best sort of father; God is there, 
God is good, and kind, and fatherly, and a friend, 
and a lover, One Who shares all our interests, Who 
never excludes anything in our lives from His mind 
or from His heart. Children always know when 
their parents are really interested in their affairs ; the 
dolls, the stamp collection, the little house among the 
bushes, the bow and arrow. The great thing that 



54 THE PILGRIM 

Jesus gives us is this conviction that God is inter- 
ested in us, down to the last details of everything 
that appeals to our own minds and natures, and that 
He is interested in us because He is fond of us. For 
example, if you have not thought about these things, 
track down through the Gospels the references of 
Jesus to God's interest in colours. Jesus speaks of 
God's interest in the lily, which, he says, for beauty 
beats "Solomon in all his glory." It is quite clear 
that colour, and movement, and form, all the things 
that make the life of nature, appealed to Jesus, and 
he saw that they all appeal to God. Other teachers 
had taught men to use the ingenuity of the universe 
as an argument for the existence of a Mind behind it. 
Jesus was touched by the beauty of living things, 
and he saw that their beauty means that God, like 
every other creative mind, loves beauty. In this way 
Jesus brings God near to us ; God, Who really likes 
and enjoys flowers and sparrows, would probably 
like little children, and Jesus says that He does. 

It is not only that Jesus sees what a delightful 
nature God really has, but he is able to translate it 
into life. His knowledge of God is not like our 
knowledge of some things which we use when we 
want them (if we ever use them at all), but it is 
translated into life with this result, that it gives life 
a new worth-while-ness. His own life, his own per- 
sonality, guarantee his insight into God. What is 
more, is the power he has of winning people to his 



THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY 55 

outlook, of launching them on the new kind of life 
that he lived, and (seeing we are using a metaphor 
from ships) of steering them when they are 
launched, and safeguarding them from all the sub- 
marine activities of the enemy of life. That he 
does this still, is the experience of Christians. 

Let us look a little at what his coming has meant 
in human history. Nothing has been more effective 
in safeguarding the individual man and woman from 
wrong and oppression than the conviction that he, 
or she, was one for whom Christ died. If Christ 
died for the slave, then we must at least be kind to 
him, and one day we shall set him free. If Christ 
died for the prostitute, then we shall have to re- 
think the conduct of life, and our whole estimate of 
women. There can be no exploiting people for 
whom Christ died. (This, by the way, is the essence 
of sin, the exploitation of man and the using of 
God's gifts against God.) Historically, where men 
and women have believed that Christ died for the 
least important of us, there has been a new honour 
for men and women, a new love for them, and a 
growing resolve that everything shall be theirs which 
their Great Friend could wish them to have. In this 
way Jesus has been the best champion of the people. 
Jesus increases the significance of men for one an- 
other; "he possessed and he conveys the genius for 
appreciation/' The definition of a gentleman as 
"one who does not put his feeling before others' 



56 THE PILGRIM 

rights, or his rights before their feelings" is exactly 
in the vein of Jesus. There may be those who see 
little in courtesy and good manners, but Jesus saw 
their inner meaning, and he taught and practised 
them. They are a recognition of the dignity of 
God's children. There was a charm about his love 
that he has been able to transmit to many of his 
followers. Charm is an unconscious thing, and it is 
never really acquired by practice, but Jesus taught 
his followers to forget themselves, and many of 
them have learnt the lesson, and catching his spirit 
have caught a great deal of his charm. 

Jesus was the great discoverer of the family. We 
are so familiar with the text "Suffer little children 
to come unto me" that we forget that a new and 
original thing it was for a great man and a great 
teacher to say. He believed in family life; he never 
taught that all the best men and women should not 
marry, he held with their marrying; and biologists 
to-day emphasize the boundless spiritual and intel- 
lectual gain ;to society, when, at the Reformation, 
marriage was given the significance that Jesus saw 
it has in God's scheme of things. It is pointed out 
how much the world owes to the good men and 
women who have married and brought up children. 
This is part of the freedom that Jesus has given us, 
and this, too, must be linked with his consciousness 
of God. 

The Sixteenth Century saw the New Testament 



THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY 5*7 

translated into English, the story of Jesus made 
available "for the boy that follows the plough"; 
and the Seventeenth Century saw a great revolution 
in England, a great achievement of freedom. The 
Eighteenth Century saw the great campaign of the 
Wesleys to win men for Jesus Christ; the Nine- 
teenth Century saw England abolish the slave trade, 
humanize her own laws, emancipate woman, and give 
her mind as never before to the interests of little 
children, not only on her own island, but all over the 
world. Why is it that where Jesus becomes a living 
reality for men, they are more human than before, 
larger of soul and of sympathy ? 

For a long time before Jesus was born, men had 
been wrestling with the idea that even foreigners are 
human. Jesus himself is the great pledge that we 
all are of one blood, "barbarian, Scythian, bond and 
free/' English, German, Indian and Chinese. There 
is a certain truth in nationalism, but Jesus made 
humanity a real thing in God. He must lay the 
foundations for any League of Nations that is to be 
real and to last. 

For the individual, Jesus has done wonderful 
things. His very existence has historically been a 
stimulus to thought. We forget sometimes that 
thought is a primary Christian duty. We forget the 
freedom of mind of Jesus, and his perpetual insist- 
ence on our thinking. "The truth shall make you 
free," we read; but the truth is not found at random, 



58 THE PILGRIM 

in the streets. Jesus has committed us to finding 
out and incorporating in life all the truth there is in 
God, to capturing the whole of God, and making God 
in all His f ultiess our own. He has not only set men 
this task, but he helps them to achieve it. Very much 
the same can be said about art as about the other 
regions of thought and feeling. One function of art 
is the enjoyment and the interpretation of "God's 
rear' in its whole complex of relations. Was there 
ever anyone who enjoyed God more than Jesus did, 
or shared his joy in God more successfully with other 
people, communicating his joy to men and women? 
Jesus was more than what we call original, he was 
originative; he had the creative mind. His parables 
are masterpieces in the use of language, so easy and 
so simple that one would not suppose there was any 
art in them. That is the very acme of art. Jesus gave 
to the individual an infinite value, and by doing so 
he opened new fields to art. Wherever the story of 
Jesus has ruled, with its freedom and with its 
breadth, men have loved art and music and laughter, 
and have enjoyed all the simple and wonderful 
things that God gives. Humour has been defined as 
the sense of contrast touched by love, the power of 
seeing the finite on the background of the infinite. 
"The real sense of humour breaks into flower when 
we have overcome the world." Yes, and who over- 
comes the world ? Who has the real peace of mind 
that is essential to humour, but those whom Jesus 



THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY 59 

has made free of the whole world, by showing them 
that they are the children of God, and that the world 
is the home God has made for them, and by giving 
them the courage to see God and to enjoy Him? 

Jesus has enlarged the capacity of men for God; 
he has made us feel that the Author of every aspect 
of life touches the human spirit at every point. He 
has made us free, to develop our characters to the 
utmost ; we are to be perfect as God is perfect. That 
includes every kind of perfection, intellectual and 
artistic, as well as moral and spiritual. Jesus has 
made God intelligible to us. He has brought God 
into our business and bosom, and he has given us the 
sense and the appetite for God. He has made us at 
home in God, and above all he has given us the 
feeling that the great joy of life is to realize God in 
every fibre of one's being, and to explore God 
through all the infinite maze of wonder and of love 
in which He shows Himself. Jesus has lit up God 
for us, turned light upon Him, and shown us that 
the great power of which we are fraid is the best 
Friend we have. In ancient days, and in the heathen 
world to-day, the object of religion is to get away 
from God. Jesus has changed all that, and made the 
object of our religion to get into the heart of God. 
He has interpreted God to us, for he himself is the 
bond of kinship between us. He is the author of 
peace, the giver of a happy mind, and that is why, to 
this day, we keep Christmas. Christmas is the Chil- 



60 THE PILGRIM 

dren's Day; what better day is there for them to 
keep than the birthday of the Great Friend, who (as 
it were) discovered them, who liked them, and was 
fonder of them than any of the world's great teach- 
ers, and who taught us all to love children with a 
new tenderness, and a new interest that the world 
had never known before? 

So the ancient Church perhaps did not make a bad 
choice, when it chose the day associated with free- 
dom and light, with the rebirth of nature, on which 
to remember the coming of Jesus. We shall use the 
day to the best purpose if we set our minds to work 
to discover, this Christmas, some new features of 
the Jesus whom we commemorate, if we read the 
Gospels over again and find out for ourselves what 
Jesus was and what he is. It is not a day on which 
we are called to celebrate a dead Jesus, but one which 
speaks to us of life and calls us to come face to face 
with a Friend, who is waiting to talk with us, to 
help us, to set us free, and to give us the light we 
need to face the darkness round about us. 



Vl 

THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 



A man who is to make anything of life, who 
means to capture the truth of things, must be, so 
Plato tells us, 1 the "spectator of all time and all ex- 
istence" — "ever longing after the whole of things 
in its entirety, divine and human." In a universe 
which has a real unity about it, half-views will not 
do. We have to practise ourselves to get out of the 
habit of the half and be resolute to live in the whole, 
the good, the beautiful. So Goethe taught; and 
Thomas Carlyle used to like to quote the German, 
and generally quoted it wrong, substituting for the 
beautiful the true. 2 Perhaps a philosopher would 
prefer Carlyle's version; but in the end the differ- 
ence grows less and less. 

Jesus has been described as a peasant, unlettered 

and untravelled. Without saying so much in so 

many words, a certain school of commentators and 

historians cannot get away from the notion that 

the marks of his date and place are indelibly upon 

1 "Republic," vi., p. 486 A. 
3 See page 102. 
61 



62 THE PILGRIM 

him. Other men of his environment had certain be- 
liefs ; phrase suggestive of them is found among his 
sayings; therefore we can reconstruct him on the 
lines of his contemporaries, and he proves to have 
been of no very unusual type, pious, moral and fer- 
vid, but hopelessly loyal to an outlook that no in- 
telligent man can keep, cloudy with dreams of mir- 
acle, and at last quite out of touch with reality, as 
unlike Plato's ideal man as one can well imagine. 
He tried, they say, to force the hand of God at last, 
and involved himself in death as the result of a des- 
perate and untenable conviction that God must bring 
him back on the clouds of heaven — which did not 
happen ; he was thus the victim of vulgar hallucina- 
tions, a peasant who had lost his balance and all 
sense of reality. 

It is curious that so great a change in human 
thought should have been inaugurated by such a per- 
son; that so often a revival of religion has been 
brought about by a return to one whose central con- 
viction was wrecked on the facts of history; that 
again and again men have found the courage to face 
the rethinking of the universe, physical and spiritual, 
in the stimulus of a poor creature with a central de- 
lusion. History is hardly to be interpreted on the 
lines of such an airy paradox ; for history is always 
rational; and a solution of historical problems, that 
depends on life and the universal proving irrational, 
cannot be true. Carlyle may be little read to-day, 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 63 

but he was right on many things, where fashion ig- 
nores him — right in his doctrine of the Hero, right 
in his conviction that all religions that have really 
moved mankind have a truth at the heart of them; 
right in maintaining that man is everywhere the 
natural enemy of all lies. A Christ who, however 
holy (whatever that vague word means), however 
pious, however beautiful, in his sublime morality and 
his trust in God and so forth, was yet mentally so 
deficient as to miss what men quite inferior to him 
could see at a glance, who would not face the facts 
of God but imposed on God a fanciful character 
of his own — such a Christ will not serve. Carlyle's 
Mahomed ( I will not pronounce on his exact relation 
to the Mahomeds of more modern Arabists) was in- 
comparably a stronger figure than this cloudy en- 
thusiast ; — to say nothing of Socrates and even Zeno 
— for they at least were teachers who based them- 
selves on fact and on the ascertainable laws of the 
universe. The Christ of the apocalyptic school is 
not Hero enough to carry a great movement; and, 
ingeniously reconstructed as he may be, some very 
obvious historical factors seem to be omitted. 

A peasant, unlettered and untravelled — so was 
Robert Burns, and it is hardly necessary to read 
Matthew Arnold's stinging criticism of his provin- 
cialism, or Carlyle's kindlier description of the nar- 
row cranny in which Burns grew (Carlyle himself 
too a peasant), to realize how local, how common- 



64 THE PILGRIM 

place, and how desperately the unlovely child of vul- 
gar surroundings Burns could be; and yet he was 
what all the world knows and loves : 

Deep in the general heart of men 
His power survives. 

So does the power of the Galilean ; and on ordinary 
lines of sane criticism, it is reasonable to ask what 
that power was. Burns' greatness is compatible with 
his baseness. The power of Jesus is unintelligible 
in conjunction with the imbecility of mind attributed 
to him in some quarters; and as the one is proved 
through all history and the other a theory of a day, 
further inquiry is obviously proper. Matthew Ar- 
nold was far nearer the mark when he said that 
Jesus was above his reporters ; they were often peas- 
ants, and they certainly were not strong in letters, 
as Paul found and bluntly stated. Even modern his- 
torians have at times, involuntarily, shown us how 
trivial a great man can look in the portrayal of an 
inadequate interpreter. Probably few of us are quite 
adequate to the task of drawing Jesus as he was. 

In any case, an inquiry into the early training of 
Jesus may help us to a better understanding of his 
capacity for the ordinary business of testing and 
comparing the values of ideas. All over the world 
we find more or less religious natures the ready prey 
of the first extravagant notion that is put plausibly 
to them; they have no background and no criticism. 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 65 

But there is something to be said for the view that 
the training of Jesus provided him with both. If the 
Gospels supply the materials for the eschatologist's 
interpretation, they offer the evidence on which we 
can rely for a more natural one, one nearer the con- 
ception of Jesus which rational men have generally 
held. It is a sound canon that the evangelists have 
to be judged by Jesus, rather than Jesus by the evan- 
gelists. And after all they did not do their work so 
badly! They drew a great figure, which has ob- 
scured their slips and has been readily interpretable 
for all simple and sincere enough to recognize great- 
ness when they see it. If the eschatologists insist on 
the letter of the Gospels where it suits them, a simi- 
lar insistence may be forgiven to those who criticize 
their inferences. "Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? 
unto Caesar shalt thou go!" And it may be added 
that the texts and passages, to which we refer, have 
this advantage; they deal with ordinary and com- 
monplace matters which do not involve miracle or 
marvel, which are taken for granted and only casu- 
ally mentioned, and which could not appeal to any 
writer as bearing on any theory of the world's end. 

ii 

To begin, then, with historical Galilee — "Galilee 
of the Gentiles." The country was only added to the 
Jewish kingdom about ioo b. c. by the conquering 
arm of "Aristobulus the King of the Jews," as he 



66 THE PILGRIM 

would be known in the world of the foreigner — Ju- 
das the high priest, as he was in Jerusalem. The 
people, like that of Edom, was forced to embrace 
Judaism, and "Aristobulus was thus the creator of 
the Galilee which we know in our gospels — a region 
whose population is Jewish in belief and practice, 
but Gentile to a large degree in descent." * In ac- 
cent (Mark xiv. 70) and in environment the people 
differed from the Jews of the South. Twenty miles 
from Nazareth was the great Mediterranean port 
where Rome poured her soldiers and officials on the 
land. 2 Westward, across the little lake, was a re- 
gion of Greek cities, famous in the history of Hel- 
lenistic culture ; did not Meleager himself come from 
Gadara? 

Galilee did not lie out of the world, and the 
world, it must be remembered, was Greek. The con- 
stant struggle of Judaism, from Antiochus Epiph- 
anes to Herod, was against Greek institutions and 
Greek ways — the Greek hat, the Greek wrestling- 
ground, the Greek theatre, the Greek temple, and 
Greek idolatry. The subtlest engine that could be 
turned against Hebrew idealism was Greek culture. 
The Greek language must have been heard every- 
where; Greek names abound, and are found among 

1 Edwvn Bevan, "Jerusalem under the High Priests," p. 115? 
Josephus, "Ant." xiii. 11, 4; Sir G. A, Smith, "Hist. Geogr. of 
Holy Land," 414, says this conquest may have been in the 
previous reign. 

a Sir G. A. Smith, "Hist. Geogr.," p. 35- 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 67 

the twelve apostles themselves : Andrew, the brother 
of the Galilaean Simon Peter, bears witness in his* 
name to the diffusion of Greek. Nor were the Jews 
and Galilaeans stay-at-home people; and, once out- 
side the Aramaic-speaking countries, Greek would be 
their universal speech, the language of commerce, the 
"pidgin English" of the day; more useful, at any 
rate as far as the Adriatic, than Latin, and the pre- 
vailing tongue of Alexandria, the greatest of all 
Jewish centres, the ancient New York. 

That Jesus was bi-lingual, that he, like so many 
contemporaries, spoke both Aramaic and Greek, 
would be hard to refute. His reported conversation 
with Pilate is positive evidence, and all probability 
points the same way. No language difficulties are 
hinted at when he crosses the lake to Decapolis, or 
travels in the direction of Tyre. A bi-lingual man 
may be dull enough — dull as a polyglot waiter; but 
there is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that Jesus 
was dull ; on any hypothesis, however humanistic, he 
had one of the clearest of minds (esthatology for 
the moment ignored) ; and an original intellect, re- 
inforced with two spoken languages, will draw from 
them a great deal more than the polymath from 
many. At the same time there is no indication that 
he had any acquaintance with Greek literature. But 
genius has a great "gift of doing without." 

From external sources we know of the energy 
and enthusiasm with which the Jews taught their 



68 THE PILGRIM 

children, or secured that others should teach thenu 
The synagogue included a school and a schoolmaster. 
If it is asked in the Fourth Gospel : "How knoweth 
this man letters, having never learned ?" (John vii. 
15), 1 it may be pointed out that "letters" in Greek 
and English is ambiguous ; a "man of letters" com- 
monly has gone beyond the alphabet. Quite apart 
from such an episode as that where Jesus reads 
Isaiah aloud in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16), the 
Synoptic Gospels imply a close knowledge of the 
Old Testament. Jesus refers to reading as freely 
and naturally as any modern teacher would : "Have 
you not read?" he asks. 2 Add then to two spoken 
languages a familiarity with the Hebrew text of the 
Old Testament, and you have a very fair refutation 
of the charge that Jesus was "unlettered." As to his 
being "untravelled," he did not see Greece and 
Italy, but he lived in a polychrome world, full of 
Greeks and Romans, and men of many other nation- 
alities, in full consciousness of the Roman Empire 
and its universality and not unaware (how could he 
not be aware?) of the Parthian power beyond the 
Euphrates (Acts ii. 9). 

But all this discussion of languages and book- 
learning is very naive after all. Heraclitus long ago 
had said that polymathy does not train the mind, or 
certain other philosophers, whom he names, would 

1 Cf. Acts iv. 13. 

a Mark xii. 26; Matt. xii. 3, 5; Matt. xix. 4; Matt. xxi. 42; 
passages referring to different incidents. 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 69 

have stood on a higher level. 1 What did Jesus learn 
from what he read and saw and heard? 

First, we can set down that freedom from the 
local and contemporary to which an intelligent 
knowledge of the history of one's own race and of 
other races will always prompt. In the Bible, as he 
had it, as he learnt it intimately and familiarly, Jesus 
was brought into touch with "all time'' so far as the 
Eastern world knew it. Of course the history of the 
world was larger than that of the Jews. But the 
Jews in their day had contact with all the great races 
of antiquity, and a bright Jewish boy who knew and 
visualized the history of his own people was in pos- 
session of background and atmosphere. That he both 
knew and visualized it, let "Solomon in all his glory" 
bear witness — it was Jesus' own phrase and it tells 
of the inward eye — and David helping himself in the 
hour of need to the shewbread, Elijah with the 
Tyrian widow, the much-travelled Queen, and 
Naaman; and three of our instances are foreigners 
of three different races. So he does not quite lack 
the emancipating touch of History. 

But the Old Testament stood for much more; it 
represented the sum of God's dealings with Israel, 
and of these he laid hold in no ordinary way. It is 
remarked that he preferred the prophets and psalm- 
ists. One scholar, at least, suggests that his favour- 

a Heraclitus fr. 16 (Bywater). 



70 THE PILGRIM 

ite was Isaiah ^ ; but he was not a man of one book, 
and a good case might be made for Hosea or Jere- 
miah. 2 He has achieved, as his Jewish contem- 
poraries did not, nor his Christian followers, at once 
an intimacy with the prophetic mind and an inde- 
pendence of it. He does not quote as the literalists 
do; he seizes the heart of the message or of the 
man. "There is an affinity of spiritual truth be- 
tween the Old Testament passage cited and the use 
of it in Jesus' teaching. The spiritual significance 
is always there." 3 He propounds no theory of in- 
spiration. It might be assumed that he simply ac- 
cepted the current view, but his treatment of Moses 
and of the laws of the Pentateuch makes this un- 
likely. A teacher who quotes what Moses said, and 
follows it up clause by clause with the words : "But 
I say unto you" ; who condemns Moses' opportunism 
oil the question of divorce, can hardly be credited 
with the dull theories of automatic inspiration which 
other men held and still hold. He expresses his own 
experiences in Old Testament language (Mark iv. 
12, vii. 6). Even in the hour of death on the cross 
the psalm comes to his lips (Mark xv. 34) . Prophet 
and psalmist spoke to his soul from their own souls ; 
he recognized the truth and power of what they 
said; his experience repeated theirs if it transcended 

*Arno Neumann, "Jesus/' p. 44 (Eng. tr.). 
3 Oscar Holtzmann, "Life of Jesus/' p. 92 (Eng. tr.). 
3 Charles S. Macfarland, "Jesus and the Prophets/' p. 107; 
cf. PP. 193, 196. 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 71 

it; and their phrase gave him again and again the 
word he wanted. 

On one who grew up in the word of prophet and 
psalmist, to whom God, the God of prophet and 
psalmist, was all, what impression would books of 
the apocalyptic type make? How many of them did 
he actually know ? What evidence have we that they 
had anything like the diffusion or acceptance of the 
Scriptures? If it is urged that he borrowed from 
them his conception of the Messiah, it may be con- 
ceded that the Messiah is mentioned in some but not 
in all these books; but once again we must guard 
against supposing that genius can borrow an idea 
from the mediocre without transforming it. If he 
borrowed the name, a very little reading will show 
how he changed the content. But the apocalyptic 
Messiah was a dim and changeable figure, varying 
with the writer. The picture of the Suffering Ser- 
vant in Isaiah is far more congenial to Jesus. A 
simpler illustration will be found in his picture of 
the Last Judgment, where the framework is more 
or less that of common acceptance, and every prin- 
ciple and nuance of the story is his own. If a man's 
central ideas are any index to his mind, and if the 
ideas are of more importance than the form in which 
they may be conveyed, then it is clear how little is the 
essential debt of Jesus to apocalytic literature. It is 
trivial, discursive, tribal, dull in imagination, and 
poor in spiritual value. 



n% THE PILGRIM 

At the same time it should be remembered that 
the writers of the apocalyptic books were children 
of an age of difficult problems and widening out- 
looks. It is not established whether they taught 
their contemporaries, or merely learnt with them, to 
enlarge their conception of God to include all history, 
past and future; but that the habit of so conceiving 
of God was not unfamiliar is proved both by their 
books and by the New Testament. If Jesus read or 
knew any of the apocalyptic books, any influence 
they could have upon him would, taken in conjunc- 
tion with that of the prophets and psalmists, be in. 
the direction of emancipation and range of mind. 
But still it is hard to suppose that he depends on'i 
such poor books for what is his outstanding charac- 
teristic. All time and all existence — real history and 
real insight into the spiritual — these he found in the 
prophets ; and trained in such a school, he had little 
difficulty in appraising the value of ideas, in books or 
out of them. 

From another point of view, it is significant to* 
realize what he thought of the Old Testament. It 
cannot have been altogether easy for him to acquire' 
his intimate knowledge of it. The rolls were read 
in the synagogue ; children were taught a good deal' 
by heart ; private reading of the books was possible 
only for those who had access to them. Would a 
carpenter's family have a set of them? Many ques- 
tions rise here; the cost of the reproduction of the 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 73 

books must have been great ; a carpenter's wages 'or 
earnings cannot have been big ; a family of boys and 
girls to feed and clothe and train does not, in com- 
mon experience, increase the margin for books. It is 
conceivable that for private and personal reading he 
had to have recourse to the synagogue copies — in 
the leisure of a working carpenter, when the books 
might be available, and when daylight served. That 
the family was one of quiet piety is proved by their 
habit of going to the synagogue, by their general sur- 
prise when Jesus preached there, by their affectionate 
dread of his new publicity, by his use of domestic, 
phrase and illustration for the inmost things of the 
kingdom of God. The home training would be based 
on knowledge and love of the Old Testament; but 
his special devotion to its reading was a matter of 
personal work and sacrifice, achieved at a cost. And, 
whatever we make of him, a spiritual genius of his 
dimensions found it a vital part of his religious life 
to read and re-read the Old Testament. It is a sig- 
nificant fact Matthew Arnold once defined culture 
briefly as a knowledge of the best that has been said; 
it is his variant on the phrase of Plato with which we 
began. The individual supplements his experience 
and corrects his deductions from it by the experience 
and the thoughts of the best men who have gone 
before him. One feels that if prophet and psalmist 
had something to contribute to Jesus and his develop- 



74 THE PILGRIM 

ment, we may not have realized how much more 
they have for us, nor what we lose by our slight 
assimilation of both the Testaments. 

in 

"As his custom was," says St. Luke (iv. 16), "he 
went into the synagogue on the sabbath day." The 
Sabbath was perhaps kept with more strictness in' 
Galilee and the north than in Jerusalem and the 
south. What it meant to Jews can be seen in the 
fanciful but suggestive sayings of the rabbis. The 
obervance of the Sabath makes a man a partner of 
God in the creation of the world; by hallowing it 
Israel brings redemption to the world and bears testi- 
mony to the divine ordering of the universe. 1 But 
perhaps even better may one gather the historical 
significance of the Sabbath from the half-flippant and 
yet serious poem of Heine, "The Princess Sabbath/' 
in which he describes how every Friday at sundown 
the fairy princess comes and transforms the dog to a 
man with a spiritual history, for twenty- four hours. 

Mr. Abrahams tells us that the New Testament 

accounts of the preaching in the synagogues are the 

most precise we possess, that they refer to the normal 

and not to the exceptional, and that we may rely on 

them completely. 2 The books of the Maccabees 

show clearly that there was public reading from the 

1 See Israel Abrahams, "Studies in Pharisaism and the 
Gospels," pp. 131; 129. 
2 Ibid., p. 7. 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 75 

scroll of the law (i Mac. i. 57, iii. 48), gatherings 
for prayer (iii. 44), and above all for the singing 
of hymns with such refrains as "His mercy is good, 
and endureth for ever." 1 This procedure, as the 
New Testament, Pliny's letters, and Justin Martyr's 
account show, as well as some passages of Tertul- 
lian, was taken over very naturally by the Christian 
church, and maintained till the end of the second 
century — with modifications required by the rites of 
baptism and the Lord's Supper, and perhaps the 
agapae. 

That it was Jesus' custom to go to the synagogue 
is confirmed by a number of similar episodes which 
follow the one that Luke records ; but it is interesting 
to have the habits of Jesus noted for us as such. It is 
suggestive too. Here in the synagogue he found rein- 
forcement ; once again he was given the opportunity 
"to survey all time and all existence." Israel's law 
and Israel's history, in Pentateuch, prophet and 
hymn, are brought forward again in a manner hal- 
lowed by long association and by the knowledge that, 
all over the world, within and without the Roman 
Empire, wherever twelve Jews resided, a similar 
worship, rich with the same reminiscences, was being 
celebrated in the same simple and natural way. It 
was a step toward the fulfilment of Jeremiah's 
prophecy of the New Covenant (Jeremiah xxxi. 31). 
x Ibtd., p. 2. 



76 THE PILGRIM 

Israel and his history, the long quest of God, the 
great revelation, the Law of God — the public wor- 
ship was indeed a survey of all time and all ex- 
istence. 

It was more. One cannot imagine that the syna- 
gogue services in Nazareth — a town, it would ap- 
pear, little esteemed — would be anything but dull. 
Read the glowing account that Apuleius gives in his 
"Golden Ass" of the sacraments and ceremonies and 
pageants of Isis, and of her mysteries, with the 
vision of "gods of the world above, gods of the 
world below," and ask what he would have said to 
this little group of laymen and women, whose wor- 
ship is listening to passages written in a book, recit- 
ing prayers and singing psalms — with the minimum 
of the music, the suggestion, the mystery, the exotic 
that he loved ; plain sense and no sacrament. It must 
have been dull enough; and the addresses by 
"scribes" may have been rather heavy and too full 
of references to books; "the learned are not light- 
handed," as a French critic has said. Yet Jesus evi- 
dently found something in it; his imagination went 
deeper than Apuleius would have gone. If the 
sacred books gave him insight into the past, the 
people showed him the present. He must have 
known them all, and their family histories and 
characters; and in the synagogue he learnt, like 
Wordsworth, to see 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 1% 

Into the depth of human souls, 
Souls that appear to have no depth at all 
To careless eyes. 1 

He had in a degree beyond us "among least things 
an undersense of greatest/' 2 Here he saw them sub 
specie ceternitatis; he looked before and after, re- 
alized the great traditions embodied in these lowly 
people, their part in handing them on and shaping 
the future (a lesson that may be remembered when 
we think of his extraordinary faith in his disciples), 
and above all God's interest in them all. 

At a time when "organized Christianity' ' comes in 
for much censure, when hymn and prayer and ser- 
mon are found dull, it may be something to recall 
once more that for a mind of the build of Jesus 
there was contribution in sharing a much formalized 
worship with quite dull people. It may not be a 
triumph of the imagination to find dull what he 
found full of appeal, full of the call of God — least 
of all when it is his story that is read and sung and 
interpreted. Judaism was held together by the syna- 
gogue ; Christianity too has always been maintained 
by the assembly of common people for a joint pur- 
pose, which no imaginative mind, no soul with a 
sense of history, can call dull — the association of 
men and women with a great past, a great future 
and an eternal God. If imagination fails us, there 

1 Wordsworth, xiii, 166. 

a Wordsworth, "Prelude," vii, 734. 



78 THE PILGRIM 

is a loyalty, a desire to know the experience of the 
Master, which must prompt to a deeper sense of the 
value of what at present fatigues us. 

But to return to the synagogue and his habit of 
going there, an intimate knowledge of common 
people and God's ordinary ways is a corrective to 
wild hopes and cloudy dreams. A soul full of the 
knowledge of God, and how God has borne Himself 
in crisis of Israel and agony of prophet, will go 
deeper into things than the restless and hurrying 
Apocalyptist, will be less disposed to expect quick 
solutions of age-long processes, will have a deeper 
faith in God than to challenge Him to hurry and 
display. 

IV 

One last habit of Jesus remains — his practice of 
leisurely prayer on the hillside in the darkness. 
Leisurely — not that the hours or minutes were 
vacant, but there was no rush of hurry about it. "I 
will hear what God the Lord will speak," said the 
Psalmist (lxxxv. 8) ; and the rate at which one will 
hear what God says will not always be the same. 
I have tried elsewhere to write of Jesus' intercourse 
with God; 1 it lies beyond us; but till we fathom 
it and experience it, we shall not understand Jesus. 
But when one compares the conception of God, in- 
volved in what the eschatological school attribute 
*"The Jesus of History," pp. no ff. 






THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 79 

to Jesus, with the picture of God which he actually 
gives us, and set it in the light of the long nights of 
prayer, of intercourse with God, which the records 
preserve for us, the contrast makes the apocalyptic 
Jesus still less possible. He has surveyed all time 
and all existence at leisure with God, gone deep into 
'God's purposes for mankind and for himself; and 
the outlook, the shallowness, the fever, attributed to 
him do not fit the man whom the gospels present to 
us. The whole character must be rethought. 



The relations of Jesus with John the Baptist are 
not very clear in the New Testament. We have 
definite statements, but they do not tell us all that 
we could wish to know ; and no ingenuity can fill the 
gaps in our knowledge. After baptism, Jesus turns 
to the desert for forty days, we are told. If we say 
in modern speech, that the carpenter leaves home and 
work, and spends six weeks in spiritual concentra- 
tion, we may have some fresh glimpse of what hap- 
pened. At the end of it, Luke tells us, that Jesus 
returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, that 
he taught in all the synagogues, and, preceded by a 
great reputation, at last came to Nazareth (Luke 
iv. 16). 

There is some doubt as to the time of this visit, 
for Mark appears to put it later, and some scholars 
say bluntly that Luke deliberately moved it forward 



80 THE PILGRIM 

to a point earlier than the ministry in Capernaum. 
It is, however, arguable that it belongs at the be- 
ginning. Mary, it is observed, records that there 
was a sermon in the synagogue, but he gives no 
account of its contents (Mark vi. 1-6). It is as-> 
sumed as "very likely'' that Jesus himself chose the 
lesson in Isaiah "which he would certainly under- 
stand in a Messianic sense"; and it is conceded that 
Luke may have taken the episode from a good tradi- 
tion. 1 But two comments may be made. First of 
all, the sermon is still lacking; even its gist is not 
given, and the text survives, hanging almost loose, 
one might say ; while what follows hardly suggests 
that the discourse took a Messianic turn. If Mark 
is right in dividing clearly between his teaching 
before and after the confession at Csesarea Philippi, 
one would not expect an abrupt announcement in 
the Nazareth synagogue. In the next place, Mr. 
Israel Abrahams presents a good case for the view 
that Jesus did not choose the passage he read. 2 

The prophet Isaiah, says Mr. Abrahams, was 
handed to Jesus ; it was not his own selection, it was 
put into his hands. The word "found" does not 
mean that he looked for the passage, but that he 
"found" it ready, when he opened the manuscript, 
a roll and not a book, which, when he was done with 
it, he "rolled up" and gave to the attendant. The 

1 0. Holtzmann, "Lif e of Jesus/' pp. 276, 277. 

a See "Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels," pp. 7-8. 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 81 

manuscript, being a roll, was unrolled as required, 
and as column after column was read it was rolled 
up again from the other end. Jesus then appears to- 
have taken it into his hands, one rolled-up part in 
each hand, and as he drew them apart, he "opened" 
at the place already selected and found the passage 
of Isaiah ready for him to read. If the text is not 
given in Luke exactly as it is in the Septuagint or the 
Hebrew, that is of little significance. The right to 
"skip" while reading the prophets is well attested. 
The passage then was very like what is called a sors 
Biblica; you open the Bible at random, or it may 
be Virgil, and the passage you light on is an oracle. 
It is said that King Charles I tried this with Virgil 
in the Bodleian, and hit on verses, only too prophetic 
for him in the fourth "iEneid." 1 

Let us see what would follow from Mr. Abrahams' 
explanation, if St. Luke's order of events holds. 
Jesus, after weeks of hard thinking in the solitude 
of the waste lands, comes to Galilee and begins to 
preach. He comes to Nazareth, the home-town, 
always the most difficult place, the centre of the 
least sympathetic criticism; if he had previously 
stood up to read in the synagogue, it would appear, 
from the general surprise at "his words of charm," 
that his neighbours had never heard him expound 
before. He stands up to read, a roll is put into 

1 So Mr T. E, Page, in his Commentary on "JEneid" iv. 
615-620. 



82 THE PILGRIM 

his hands; he draws the rolled-up ends apart; it 
proves to be Isaiah; and there before his eyes, un- 
sought, are the crucial words, his very commission : 
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath 
anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he 
hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight 
to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 
to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." A coin- 
cidence — or a message from God, a confirmation of 
all that has come to him in the wilderness? For a 
coincidence to coincide, we must remember, a previ- 
ous correspondence is needed; if such thoughts 
were not in his mind, the passage might have been 
silent to him. It looks as if it spoke to him, as if 
(whatever became of the sermon and the audience) 
the text were associated with one of those psycholog- 
ical experiences which men recall as landmarks. Ac- 
cident — you say; the man may let you call it what 
you like ; what happened at that moment to soul and 
mind was decisive in his life. It is significant that, 
when the messengers of John come to Jesus (which 
Luke puts after this reading in the synagogue), and 
ask for a message, Jesus substantially quotes this 
passage; and there are other echoes of its phrases 
in his speech on other occasions. 

But, if we are building too much on the Lucan 
order, none the less the fact stands that this pas- 
sage of Isaiah is associated in Jesus' mind with his 



THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH 83 

call, with Jhis Messiahship, to use the word which 
Peter employed. His call is linked with the words 
of a spiritual hero of his race of old time; one to 
whom in instinct and insight he stood very close ; his 
call has upon it the stamp of the highest and 
truest experience of his people. If apocalyptic books 
contributed, directly or indirectly, in his own read- 
ing or in other men's quotations, to him, their 
gifts are controlled by the prophetic view of life and 
of God; the prophetic is not swamped in the 
apocalyptic. Further, the call shapes itself in 
words that describe the very people with whom he 
had worked and worshipped — the sad, the desolate, 
the broken, the poor, and poorer than they guessed 
themselves, that day in Nazareth. The past and the 
present are linked in the call, and both with God; 
"the spirit of the Lord is upon me." The great 
discipline of Bible, synagogue and prayer, "the sur- 
vey of all time and all existence," has borne its 
supreme fruit. 



VI 

THE TALENTS 

One of the things which, as the Gospels record, 
astonished Jesus was the slowness of m&a's minds, 
their want of insight, the dulness of their imagina- 
tion. The Gospel of Mark gives instances of the 
disciples themselves shocking him by want of faith 
and want of intelligence. "To you it is given to 
know the mysteries/' he said ; and they did not know 
them ; they ought to see, but they only half saw, only 
half realized, and constantly missed the point of 
what he was telling them. Not to pursue the subject 
over too wide a field, we may turn to a parable in 
which he sketches the danger of the slack or dull 
imagination. 

i 

It comes like a page of contemporary history. It 
would take some research in Tacitus and the other 
historians to say how often, since Rome had begun 
to interfere in the East down to the days when she 
was mistress of it to the Euphrates, members of royal 
and noble houses in the Eastern Mediterranean area 
went to Rome to secure thrones and kingdoms. 



THE TALENTS 85 

Herod, so-called the Great, was plunged into danger 
after the death of Julius Caesar; he concealed his 
family with great difficulty in a rock-stronghold on 
the border of Judaea, and then went off in search of 
Mark Antony, or some recognizable constituted 
Roman authority, to regain his Jewish kingdom. 
Permission was readily given him, and he returned 
with the royal title, but, as if he were a mere 
pretender, he had to recapture his kingdom from the 
patriots. He did it at last, by means of Samaritan 
and Edomite troops and other mercenaries, and with 
the support of Roman legionaries. Once he had re- 
captured Jerusalem, his capital, his executioners 
made havoc among the noble families there. So 
in substance says Mommsen. 1 Again when Antony 
fell, Herod had to see Augustus and get his kingdom 
confirmed anew. He took the precaution of first 
killing the last male descendant of the Maccabsean 
house, then went to Rhodes and saw the Emperor, 
who extended and consolidated the kingdom. 
Augustus had his own opinion of Herod; he would 
feel safer, he said, as Herod's pig (5s) than as 
his son (vlosj , But Herod was a drastic and, on 
the whole, a capable man, and it was good policy to 
disturb as little as possible what gave promise of 
effective settlement. This was twenty or thirty years 
before the birth of Christ (31 B. a). Herod lived 

1 Mommsen, "The Provinces of the Roman Empire," Vol. IL 
ch. xi. pp. 178 if. 



86 THE PILGRIM 

to 4 B.C. "There is probably/' says Mommsen, "no 
royal house of any age, in which bloody feuds raged 
in an equal degree between parents and children, 
between husbands and wives, and between brothers 
and sisters." Yet Herod was an energetic and in- 
telligent ruler; he built the Temple at Jerusalem to 
please the Jews, 1 the circus to please other people, 
imperial temples in Jewish towns to flatter Augustus ; 
he made friends in the lands around, rebuilt Csesarea, 
put down brigandage and defended his frontiers 
against the Arabs of the desert. But he died at last, 
and his kingdom was divided among his three sons. 
Archelaus got Judaea, but he had to go to Rome 
to have the grant confirmed; and a Jewish embassy 
also went to prevent it, and to secure autonomy. 2 
They plead their cases before Augustus in the temple 
of Apollo, and Augustus gave a part of Herod's 
kingdom to Archelaus as ethnarch. He was a 
thoroughly bad ruler, and Judaea in 6 a.d. was made 
a province of the second rank. In 37 a.d. Agrippa, 
a grandson of Herod and of the beautiful Mariamne, 
"about the most worthless and abandoned of the 
numerous Oriental princes' sons living in Rome," 
and the friend of the new Emperor Gaius, was re- 
warded with Judaea. Others of the family held 
tetrarchies or kingdoms at periods throughout the 

*It did not please them; see Bevan, "Jerusalem under the 
High Priests," p. 157. 

a Josephus, "Bell. Jud.," ii. 6, I, 156; "Antiq. Jud.," xvii. II, 
1,860. 



THE TALENTS 87 

century, and after the fall of Jerusalem Agrippa II. 
(to whom Paul spoke) kept a small principality till 
he died in Trajan's reign (about ioo a.d.). 1 Prob- 
ably the Herods were not the only noble family oc- 
cupied with getting and losing kingdoms at the 
hands of the Romans in the Orient, whose adven- 
tures might be told among the Jews. 

It is not at all unlikely that Jesus knew the story 
of Archelaus, and everybody knew the dynasty. So 
that this parable, at any rate, was drawn from more 
or less contemporary history, and no names were 
needed. The whole thing is full of actual life. It is 
noticeable that there are other parables, or frag- 
ments of parables, which turn on a somewhat similar 
theme — the absent master and the slaves in charge ; 
and in at least one of them are traits taken, it would 
seem, from the old story of Ahikar. The traduced 
and vanished uncle reappears, suddenly vindicated, 
and the wicked nephew bursts asunder in surprise and 
remorse. But we need not linger over them, nor 
perhaps lay too much stress on Archelaus. The 
ruler, pictured by Jesus, shows more of the first 
Herod, we might say. The historical background 
is ample and certain enough ; but Jesus tells the story 
for his own purposes, he handles it freely, and gives 
no names. The situation, the men in charge, and 
the developments that follow the King's return are 
the main points. 

1 Mommsen, "Provinces," ii. p. 219. 



88 THE PILGRIM 

II 

The nobleman of the parable sets off for Rome, 
and leaves his servants in control of everything. He 
had no one else to leave. Even Roman Emperors 
down to Claudius had in general no others on whom 
to depend than freedmen and slaves. As soon as 
possible the nobleman's fellow-citizens, who hated 
him, sent their embassy with all speed. The short 
sketch of Josephus leaves us room to surmise what 
went on in Rome — what networks were woven of 
intrigue and counter-intrigue, what bribery there was 
of Imperial freedmen and chamberlains and secre- 
taries, and of everybody who could be supposed 
to have access to them or influence over them. In 
Archelaus' case all Rome's ghetto got to work. It 
meant endless money ; and it serves in part to explain 
the interest attaching to the procedure of the servants 
in charge in the East, whether slaves or freedmen. 

We need not pursue these Roman manoeuvres, but 
they affect our story in that the uncertainty of the 
issue was felt in the home-land every day. It was 
"even chances" whether the nobleman or the em- 
bassy bribed the right man or caught the Emperor 
at the right moment; for we are not tied down to 
Augustus, and in the reign of Tiberius everything 
was more chancey. It was possible, too, that the 
nobleman would never come back at all ; there were 
risks of sea and land ; or the Emperor might detain 
him in Rome and banish him. Anything might 



THE TALENTS 89 

happen, and no man could foresee the event. The 
servants were living in a definitely hostile atmos- 
phere; every patriot in the country was ready to do 
them an ill turn if they were loyal to their master, 
and eager to abet them in any disloyalty. To detach 
them from Herod's cause would help the country's ; 
to neutralize them with courtesies, or bribes, or 
other seductions, was patriotic. And all the time 
there was the chance that, in the language of states- 
men, they were putting their money on the wrong 
horse. The combination of uncertain success and 
steady ill-will was enough to unsettle many men. 

Some of the servants perhaps reflected like the 
man in the other story (Luke xii. 45) : "My Lord 
delayeth his coming/' and took like him to beating 
the men and women slaves under him, to eating 
and drinking and being drunken; and at last were 
surprised by the triumphant return and the horrible 
doom suggested in that parable. But the wasters 
and their fate are not very interesting either to us 
or to the teller of the tale. 

The servants who put their mind on their work 
are lightly sketched in the original, but there is no 
harm in lingering over them and trying to recapture 
what lineaments we may. Here is one of them, a 
quiet sort of man who says very little, who listens 
casually to what men say, who drifts around markets 
and seems to do very little ; he sits about with men 
doing business or talking over business done. You. 



90 THE PILGRIM 

do not catch him in any hurry or fussing about 
work; is he doing anything? After a while, if you 
watch, you notice that, though he seems constantly 
to have leisure, he frequents a particular type of 
society — not wasters, but men who occasionally drop 
information, which he hardly appears to notice — 
detail about crops and their prospects, odd facts 
about markets and freights, the movement of goods, 
rumours of the outside world, caravans turning up 
from the further Orient, chances a man might use if 
he cared to pick up stuff from Persia or India — not 
much in it perhaps, but it might turn out all right — 
movements of troops and random tales of where 
they are to be marched or quartered; all sorts of 
casual talk, not very unlike what you may hear to- 
day from men at loose ends for the moment, chat- 
ting of what may while away the time, talk of little 
account, but yet with information in it. So the 
stream of conversation ripples on ; and then it turns 
out that this easy-going listener has caught a gleam 
or two among the pebbles, so to speak, — has guessed 
at alluvial gold being a possibility — has acted. These 
men would have lied if they had thought there was 
anything he specially wanted to know; they would 
have been alert at once, if they had guessed how 
much interested he was; but he showed no sign. 
Only those who got on his trail found that he had 
used the chance remarks about crops, had compared 
and sifted them with unsuspected shrewdness, had 



THE TALENTS 91 

cornered grain quickly, and despatched it by mule- 
teers returning empty to where the troops were to 
be stationed ; he had picked up odd things from the 
caravans, listlessly bargaining or making friends 
with the Persians ; he always knew what prices were, 
though he said little about them and never asked and 
never noticed very much, and he had a pretty 
shrewd idea what they were going to be. He kept 
turning his master's money over, oftener than men 
realized, though they came by and by to gather that 
he was doing pretty well, and began to attend to 
him, to give him information with one motive or 
another. In fact, he that hath, to him shall be 
given and he shall have abundance (Matt. xiii. 12) ; 
after a while he always knew what he wanted to 
know, picked it up, or got it out of the man who 
knew, and would help him in return — making friends 
with mammon, even if it had a little taint here or 
there of unrighteousness (Luke xvi. 9). 

Another was of a different type, a good deal 
blunter and more direct. Someone whispered to 
him of a scheme that was to undo Herod, of the 
extraordinary advantages for him in it, how well 
worth his while he would find it ; what did he think 
of it? And he said abruptly that he didn't think of 
it; and there was an end of it. He was a marked 
man after that; all Herod's enemies watched him, 
some eager to trip him, some glad to keep out of 
his way. He hammered along at his task, got work 



92 THE PILGRIM 

and plenty of it out of his underlings, made his 
lands do their work, an acre with him had to do 
an acre's job ; and he would have no slacking in man 
or beast or field. He was up early and to bed late, 
and saw to things himself; he worked harder than 
the first man appeared to do, and made less of it. 
But his blunt loyalty had done good; men knew 
where he stood, and he was a great strength to 
people who were a little uncertain. 

in 

At last the news came that the Emperor had made 
up his mind. Augustus in his old age had not always 
been very quick or clear about details of foreign 
policy; and Tiberius (the reigning Emperor) more 
and more resented making decisions, he liked to leave 
things ambiguous, and to postpone questions; drift 
settled his policy very often. However, our story 
tells us that the unnamed nobleman got the award 
he wanted and came back to be king. The whole 
situation was acutely changed; there was no longer 
the least uncertainty about the future, and the pro- 
spective king's character was fairly known. The 
waster and the drunkard began to try to pull things 
together, of course unsuccessfully. The second of 
the two men we studied said in his abrupt way, with 
a grunt of satisfaction: "I knew he would pull it 
off," and drove on with his work. The first man 
said, as usual, very little, but seemed rather more 



THE TALENTS 93 

occupied than before ; he had more now to do than 
any of them; his money was everywhere, and there 
was a lot of it, and he had to get it in — a little 
grieved, here and there, that one or two more likely 
coups must be let go now ; but his affairs were end- 
less in their ramifications, and he must have all ready 
for an audit — which, however, did not seem to 
worry him. So Herod came home. 

How the kingdom had "Feen governed we need not 
inquire closely. The new king would take it over 
and manage it, as the Roman government had, and 
the previous king, as the Seleucid emperors before 
him had, and Alexander before them, and the Per- 
sians before Alexander. Little change was wanted 
or necessary ; in the Orient the old ways go on and 
a wise ruler can "make do with them," provided that 
the men at the crucial points are reliable. The sys- 
tem never changes very much. The census twenty 
years ago in Syria was taken much as under the 
Roman emperors, and one man, whom I heard telling 
of it, narrated how he had orders to go to Beyrout 
to be enrolled as he "belonged" there — the same ar- 
rangement that St. Luke records (ii. 1-4), and that 
we find in the papyri. 1 The vital point was the selec- 

1 Cf. G. Milligan, "Greek Papyri," No. 28. Gaius Vibius 
Maximus, Prefect of Egypt (says) : "Seeing that the time has 
come for the house to house census, it is necessary to compel 
those who for any cause whatsoever are residing out of their 
nomes (nomoi) to return to their homes (ephestia), that they 
may both carry out the regular order of the census, and may 
also attend diligently to the cultivation of their allotments/' 
This order belongs to the year a.d. 104. 



94 THE PILGRIM 

tion of the right men for the key-positions. This 
is the explanation of the abrupt delegation of faith- 
ful servants to the charge of cities, roughly answer- 
ing to the talents they had accumulated. There is also 
a play in the Semitic language on the words used 
for talents and cities — there are exactly the same 
letters in each, but in a different order. 

Herod is now absolute master of the country, 
kingdom or tetrarchy or whatever it is ; and he pro- 
poses to govern it on the old lines and make of it 
all he can. He has to keep the people quiet, without 
revolts or scandals that could reach Rome — the pre- 
caution which Archelaus neglected. But, if there 
are no public disorders or scandals, he has a free 
hand, and he proposes to squeeze out of his subjects 
the utmost possible. It is not a lofty idea of mon- 
archy, but many great houses have held it or some- 
thing very like it, down to King Leopold II in our 
own day. All over the territory things will have 
to be looked into — especially the personnel; and he 
must have at the top men whom he can absolutely 
trust — as viziers, if the word is not too large for 
them. It has never been so important for him to 
be absolutely sure of the character of his men ; they 
may have their faults and vices, but he must be able 
to rely on their loyalty, their energy and their intel- 
ligence. They must be the men to see instantly 
what is to be done, to foresee and to forestall what 
hostile persons or groups will do, to leave nothing to 



THE TALENTS 95 

chance, and to recognize an indication when they 
see it, and, whatever is to be done, to do it first, be- 
fore anybody else can get started. It is with this 
object primarily that he holds his inquiry. No doubt 
he is interested in seeing how his affairs stand; but 
the contemptuous way, in which he hands over the 
restored talent to the servant who made ten, is proof 
that money was not now his chief interest ; he wanted 
men. 

The drunkard and the wastrel are not long in 
reaching outer darkness — weeping and gnashing of 
teeth. Herod's career has given him opportunity to 
read character, and that type is quickly read. Then 
follow the two men we have described. 

The one has ten talents to show. No one would 
have guessed he had done so well. Herod takes a 
quick, sharp second look at him; "He'll do!" he says 
to himself ; and the man gets "Well done !" It is to 
be noted that if Herod recognized his man, his man 
knew him before; he had seen in him, no doubt, the 
qualities later enumerated, and had not misliked 
them; frankly, he had admired Herod, and "Well 
done !" from Herod's lips would set him recalling the 
laudari a laudato viro, if he knew so much Latin. 
All sorts of people may praise you, and it is mere ful- 
some vanity; but let the master-hand take notice of 
your work! you do not want words, if you catch him 
interested. So much for the man, and we can under- 
stand the upwelling of pleasure in him, even if the 



96 THE PILGRIM 

quiet face familiar to us betrays only a shade more 
feeling than usual. But let us try to understand 
Herod too — the relief and satisfaction with which 
he hails the discovery of quality in this man and in 
the sturdy loyalist of the square jaw, who brings 
him five talents. They are men who have worked 
steadily and faithfully when his fortunes were at 
the darkest, who have the wit to watch and venture 
and achieve, men sturdily and successfully identified 
with their master, who had believed in him before his 
fortunes were established. If his praise was swift 
and lavish, it was meant, as his instant proposal of 
a great new opportunity shows ; he believes in them 
and can reward their faithfulness in very little, as 
he now puts it, by making them rulers over much, 
by giving them at once work on a large and more 
splendid scale and reward out of all proportion to 
what they have done. 1 

IV 

But the servant with one talent is the man on 
whom Jesus has spent most care in this story, draw- 
ing him with an individuality which he did not elab- 
orate in the two faithful men. That they have 
character, is implied by the whole narrative ; but as 
Jesus groups his picture at last, they stand for the 
moment, as it were, one on the right hand and the 

*Luke xix. 17, 19; Matt. xxv. 21, 23; cf. also Luke xii. 44; 
the point is not accidental. 



THE TALENTS 97 

other on the left of their master, figures worth our 
attention indeed — but the centre is held by the new 
king and this curiously-drawn servant of his. It is 
as if Jesus meant us to study him with closer interest. 
The man is not exactly a bad servant; he would be 
classed by most of us in quite a different category 
from the drunken and wasteful slave of the other 
parable — but Herod has a different opinion, he 
groups them. The man has a sense of responsibility ; 
and he certainly has an eye for character. He makes 
it quite clear that he understands the Herod type — 
he sketches it to the life — and the conclusion of the 
story shows in the king's words and acts, in his 
treatment of this man himself, and of the plotters 
who sent the embassy to Rome, but the delineation 
was so far right. But the man had never realized 
what his knowledge meant. He knew the value of 
property, and he took care of it in the traditional 
way of the Orient. On the day that I left Madura 
in Southern India in 191 5, a little pocketful of 
Roman gold pieces of the first century, coins of Nero 
and Domitian, in excellent condition, were dug up 
in the compound of a factory. The man was not 
to be blamed, surely, for doing what the cannier 
members of every family had always done and do 
still. Probably hundreds of the sovereigns that have 
disappeared from our use are under ground in India 
and Arabia, hundreds and thousands. The man did 
not like the incessant speculation of the first servant; 



98 THE PILGRIM 

it was risky. He does not see that use implies risk, 
and that money and other endowments are for use; 
he takes care of them, and misses the fact that his 
safe line of keeping the treasure absolutely intact 
and secure against loss means simply the deprecia- 
tion of the treasure with the very loss he is guard- 
ing against. He is a hoarder, a matter-of-fact per- 
son, very commonplace in spite of his shrewdness; 
and he gives himself away. He does not understand 
currency, or opportunity. 

He does not understand his master. How he ex- 
pected his master to tolerate his plain language, we 
can only guess; perhaps Herod would have taken 
it from the second servant, with a laugh. But if 
this man draws Herod's character aright, how could 
he expect him to be satisfied without the interest that 
his wealth should bring him? But he fails in an- 
other way, and more hopelessly. As a critic of his 
master, shrewd as he is, he fails (as shrewd critics 
do) by getting the harder and meaner features of the 
king, and missing the large and generous traits in his 
character — the capacity for giving warm and glow- 
ing praise — the keen appreciation of character and 
energy, that marks the man of action. He knows 
the hard, exacting and cruel Herod; he misses the 
Herod of expanding ideas, the Herod of the new 
monarchy. He had never really understood the 
hopes and the passion of his master, he had never 
quite believed in the kingdom to be, he had not seen 



THE TALEN1 99 

the future with its possibilities, he had been content 
to safeguard the present and let the future go. He 
had no imagination, no sense of a situation, no 
vision. And now — of what conceivable use is he? 
He has shown he cannot be trusted with the work 
most urgent to be done — what sort of use could he 
be with his prudential half-views, his reluctance to 
face facts and act on them, his half-knowledge of 
men, his inability to commit himself to any action 
that implies faith either in the future or in his 
master — and his consummate self-satisfaction? The 
swift and incisive Herod is done with him— has him 
hurled contemptuously out — and turns headlong to 
his next business, which, as we have seen, happens 
to be that blending of policy and violence that makes 
so large a part of Oriental king-craft — action and 
insight (of a kind) once more in this man of force. 
The cool brutality of the house shocked the Romans ; 
to us it may suggest once more how absurdly out 
of place this man would have been in Herod's 
service. 



Elsewhere Jesus spoke of men who seeing see not, 
and hearing hear not, and never understand. Here 
he has drawn a picture of the type; why did he think 
it important to draw him with such care? Or are 
we to throw the emphasis elsewhere, with some 
critics, and think chiefly of the lord who goes away 



100 THE PILGRIM 

and returns within a measurable time? Is Jesus 
necessarily thinking of a speedy return, on the clouds, 
that literalist obsession which some scholars insist 
on sharing with him? Why is it that when two 
readings, two interpretations, are possible, some will 
(always have us take that which definitely lacks 
genius? Did Shakespeare mean to write of the 
dying Falstaff, "his nose was as sharp as a pen, on a 
table of green fields" (or baize), -or do we owe that 
to two blunderers, who did not understand the 
famous knight, nor know his story, nor guess that 
the dying man, who "cried out God, God, God, three 
or four times/' "babbled o' green fields"? Must the 
dullest reading, the most lack-lustre meaning, always 
be right? Shakespeare was not matter-of-fact. 
Jesus was greater than his commentators ; there was 
more life, and fuller, in him ; and there is really more 
danger of under-interpreting his words than of find- 
ing too much in them, at any rate, for those of 
us who are not his •equals. We need not limit his 
meaning here to a speedy second advent, nor his 
moral to the platitude "let every one seek to increase 
his religious possessions." 1 There is a spaciousness, 
a width of range, in all his talk; it is apt to cover a 
good deal of life. There are all sorts of talents ; and, 
if Jesus does not claim that "the natural gifts of his 
disciples were derived from himself," he probably 
1 1 take this interpretation from the pages of a great scholar. 



THE TALENTS 101 

would not, if questioned, exclude them from the 
consideration of those whom his parable reaches. 

The drift of the parable, for those who have ears 
to hear, and take the trouble to hear, should be 
clear enough, even if he did not unfold it, allowing 
some interpretations and excluding others. There 
are talents entrusted to a man, by God, by Jesus, per- 
haps by other men — natural capacity, charm, vision 
of the real gospel, learning, responsibility or even 
money. Does he realize the seriousness and the 
potentialities of the gift, the urgency of getting to 
work with it for the absent Master of all gifts, the 
amazing return that such work can yield in imme- 
diate result, in praise from above, in magnified op- 
portunity? Take the parable in conjunction with 
the general teaching of Jesus — surely the soundest 
canon of interpretation; who hath ears to hear, let 
him hear, he said (Matt. xiii. 9), and take heed 
what ye hear (Mark iv. 24), or, how ye hear (Luke 
viii. 18) ; whosoever hath, to him shall be given and 
he shall have more abundance ; but whosoever hath 
not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath 
(Matt. xiii. 12). What do such passages suggest, 
if not that, in the very construction of the world as 
God made it and wanted it, we must reckon with 
the danger of losing an unused faculty, the certainty 
of sin working itself out in the decline and deprava- 
tion of the effective elements of nature and char- 
acter, and the rejection of the unfit (a dextrine more 



102 THE PILGRIM 

often applied to-day to the physical aspects of life 
than to the spiritual) — and conversely that we may 
count on the growth of a man's aptitudes and facul- 
ties, and the widening of his scope, as the certain 
result of his using God's gifts? 

Behind all this, what does Jesus suggest by the care 
with which he draws the old-fashioned servant? Is 
it not a reminder that life rests on the training of 
the imagination, or vision? Is it not, taken with 
others of his lessons, a warning against the realiza- 
tion of things by halves — against the danger, clear 
everywhere, but in the most serious region of all, 
the spiritual, far more significant, of being content 
with an un-thought-out, an unrealized life? Carlyle 
used to like to quote Goethe's lines from the General' 
beickte: 

Uns vom Halben zu entwohen 
Und im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen, 
Resolut zu leben. 

So far the two teachers agree. But Jesus has the 
wider and deeper survey. What of unrealized spirit- 
ual endowment and opportunity, of unrealized care- 
lessness in things of eternal moment, of good and 
evil half known and largely taken for granted? Is 
that life — before the bright keen eyes of the teacher 
from Nazareth? Or what of an un-thought-out 
Christ, known more or less, accepted in a traditional 
creed, and never "brought into our business and 
bosom," but left in half knowledge? Is not the 



THE TALENTS 103 

weakness of our modern Christianity precisely this — 
that we are content with the slack imagination, with! 
sheer half knowledge, dim, lack-lustre and dead, 
where Jesus Christ is concerned — that we "make 
nothing of him"? 

The parable points to the possibility of an intenser 
life, a quicker imagination, a fuller surrender of all 
the powers to the interests of the Master — a braver 
acceptance of hostile environment — a gayer and 
bolder snatching of opportunities — incessant devel- 
opment, till the servant of Christ, whatever the call, 
however novel or odd the situation, will know in- 
stinctively what to do. Instinct in art and in life 
is not an accidental thing, a gift that one has or 
has not. It is psychologically as probable that the 
faculty comes from the wish or the purpose to use 
it, as the other way; without doubt the developed 
faculty does, and that, after all, is the one that 
counts. The Christian instinct is the outcome of 
experience and thought, so deep, so inwoven with 
the whole man, as to be hardly conscious, but always 
real and effective — the outcome of a progressive sur- 
render to Christ and an active and increasing asso- 
ciation with him. 

At the back of it all is the king in the parable — 
a Herod in this case, but a Herod with quick eyes 
for the kind of merit he prefers, who likes a man of 
force, and rewards him with chance after chance. 
It is not straining the story to say that it suggests 



104 THE PILGRIM 

another Master, with the same quick eyes for the 
type of man that he likes, who loves energy and 
reality and character, and who assuredly is never 
long in coming and clapping his man on the back 
and having him up higher for better service and 
closer intimacy. 



VII 

THE LAST EVENING 

It is curious to compare the accounts given by St. 
John and by the Synoptists of the last evening spent 
by Jesus with his disciples. From the days when 
Tatian in the second century made the first written 
harmony of the Gospels, their readers have been 
apt to combine the data of all four evangelists in a 
composite picture which sometimes is distinct from 
that given by any one of them. As our common 
literary habits are uncritical, and as the blending of 
historical narrative is one of the most delicate tasks 
of historical criticism, it comes upon us with some- 
thing of a surprise, or even shock, to find how the 
reconstructions we make for ourselves deviate from 
our sources. Professor Kirsopp Lake's book on the 
Resurrection set out the several accounts sepa- 
rately and clearly, and one reader at least owned to 
him what a revelation the book had been to him of 
his own inattention; and the brilliant author con- 
fessed to the same experience. 

Everybody familiar with the New Testament 
from childhood, as so many of us are, tends to asso- 
ciate the last night with two things, the institution 

105 



106 THE PILGRIM 

of the Lord's Supper and the discourse that begins 
"Let not your heart be troubled" — the four chapters 
of St. John that concluded with the prayer. Yet, at 
least, three controversies of some moment have 
turned upon these. On what night, the Passover 
night or that before it, was this gathering held, with 
all the momentous doings that followed it? What 
;is the historical authority or purpose of John's 
gospel? And, most serious and perhaps most difficult 
of all, did Jesus design and enjoin an institution, a 
memorial rite, a sacrament or a simple habit of 
self -reminder — or anything at all — when he broke 
the bread and gave the cup? Or is his action inter- 
preted by very early church practice, and his lan- 
guage coloured, naturally and guilelessly, by the asso- 
ciations that grew up with that practice ? These ques- 
tions are asked, and the answers are not very easy 
to find; in fact, as often happens with fundamental 
questions, their difficulty is only discovered by study, 
the first result of which is a sense of growing con- 
fusion. For once it may be possible to leave them 
for a while on one side and confine ourselves to 
watching our Lord, so far as we can, in the narra- 
tive of St. Luke. The boldest expositor must con- 
fess that there are things in the Lucan account which 
perplex him. But, honestly recognizing particulars 
that baffle us and reserving judgment on the institu- 
tion or non-institution of a memorial or a sacrament, 
can we address ourselves to a problem less contro- 



THE LAST EVENING 107 

versial, but hardly less significant, and ask what 
help the data of Luke give us to discover the mind 
of our Lord and its movements during the hours of 
this strange last night ? One or two particulars will 
be borrowed from the other Synoptists, but not such 
as add new features to the story ; they will serve to 
develop what we already have in St. Luke. 

I found, in studying the character of Jesus as the 
Gospels give it to us, that some of his most striking 
pieces of self -revelation come in Luke's chapter 
(xxii.) which describes the last evening; and it was 
not for some time that I saw the significance of this. 
Some of them are sayings which bear the stamp of 
genuineness upon them — too loosely connected with 
the texture of the story to be required by the narra- 
tive, and too susceptible of unorthodox interpreta- 
tion to have been invented, or to have been kept 
unless their attestation was very strong. They have 
the marks of being the authentic recollections of 
someone who was present — like so much else in the 
gospels, the indelible memories of moments of great 
psychological interest, when the listener's mind was 
startled into great attention. Again and again the 
Gospels give us episodes, so short, so vivid, and 
(when we really understand the men and the period) , 
so obviously startling that it is plain they rank with 
those unforgettable impressions of scenes and words 
that life gives to every one of us — impressions very 



108 THE PILGRIM 

deep and enduring that keep their sharp edges, the 
ipsissima verba, as long as we live. 

It has been held, and there is something in the 
suggestion, that in his last week or two of life Jesus 
took precautions not to be assassinated in quiet. The 
narrative makes it quite plain that he expects be- 
trayal and death; a public death it shall be. As a 
rule we interpret his foreknowledge too rigidly, and 
ignore the processes by which he learnt to forecast 
the future — processes made quite plain by the author 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who says that Jesus 
learnt by suffering. Then, for a time not specified, 
he learns the mind of Judas, by suffering — perhaps 
from the days when, after Peter's confession at 
Caesarea, he speaks publicly of crosses to be carried 
by those who follow him, and Judas, more quickly 
than the rest, sees what he means and realizes his 
own mistake in following him. The souring of such 
a nature must have been particularly painful to Jesus, 
the sensitiveness of whose spirit is another thing 
from the softness which painters give him — another 
thing altogether, and more closely bound up with 
his mental and spiritual greatness, the organ of all 
his apprehension. We habitually under-estimate the 
passion of Christ by losing sight of the days and 
weeks that led to the cross. 

What a flood of light falls on his mind and his 
feeling when, realizing something of what these 
weeks had meant to him in pain and strain, in the 



THE LAST EVENING 109 

growing sense of betrayal and of the horror of his 
end, we read the quiet words : "With desire I have 
desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer' ' 
(Luke xxii. 15). The expression is no more Greek 
than it is ordinary English, but it is an attempt, one 
of several of the kind made by Luke, to represent a 
Semitic idiom which expresses an action in an in- 
tensive form. 1 "I have longed, above everything, to 
have this meal with you, before — before it" It is 
a cry from the heart, from friend to friends, at a 
.moment of supreme solitude and anxiety. Above 
everything he has wished to spend his last evening 
with them; it may be, to make the last effort to lay 
bare his mind and purpose to them, to get them at 
last to understand him ; certainly, to have their sup- 
port, their presence with him at the crisis, the stay- 
ing-power of love and friendship. A little later in 
the chapter, the thought recurs in a very signal 
sentence: "Ye are they that have continued with 
me in my temptations ,, (xxii. 28). Temptation is 
a keyword in this chapter (xxii. 28, 40, 46), and it 
is linked with companionship in his thought, the 
danger with the safeguard. It is a revelation of his 
nature; like Paul, he is sensitive to being alone. 2 It 
is the more significant because we read of his spend- 
ing long hours alone in prayer. But in temptation he 

*Cf. Acts vii. 34, I have seen, I have seen (Greek: having 
seen I saw); Acts v. 28 (Greek: with charging we charged 
you). 

*Cf. 2 Cor. ii. 13, vii. 5-7. 



110 THE PILGRIM 

has found genuine help in the presence of the friends 
who do not understand him, who miss his ideas and 
think on a different plane, but who quite conspicu- 
ously like him and enjoy him and believe in him, and 
more — who are with tern, his own and available for 
him. The two sayings, then, taken together show 
something of what he is undergoing — temptation, 
inner solitude, and an intense craving to have them 
with him once again when he needs them more than 
ever. This self-revelation, further, is an element in 
his gift of binding men to himself ; the outgoing and 
craving of a strong rich nature is part of its appeal, 
it draws men and holds them. In weaker characters 
it sometimes has that effect; more here, in the 
stronger, such a demand for what men can give, 
coming with incomparable gifts to fliem, is one 
secret of his power. 1 What a reaction it must have 
produced in their minds to learn that in his dark 
hours they had done something for him; they had 
never guessed it, and now he told them. And his 
telling of the past shows what he is undergoing 
now. 

At this point Luke sets the much-discussed refer- 
ence to the cup and the bread. We shall not here 
add to the discussion, beyond noting it as remarkable 
that between the injunction as to the bread ("this 
do in remembrance of me") and the comparison of 

* I am tempted to quote, but content myself by referring the 
reader to the passage in Browning's "Flight of the Duchess," 
beginning, "It is our life at thy feet we throw." 



THE LAST EVENING 111 

the cup with the shedding of his blood, the whole 
meal intervenes. 

Jesus, as we saw, had felt increasingly that the 
development of Judas' present attitude must bring 
him to betrayal of his Master ; and now he puts his 
conviction to the test. He announces that one of 
the disciples will betray him. Luke does not say 
more than that "they began to inquire among them- 
selves which of them it was that should do this 
thing" (xxii. 23). Mark, whose narrative was be- 
fore Luke as he wrote, has verses, which it seems 
strange that Luke did not keep: "And they began 
to be sorrowful, and to say unto him, one by one, 
Is it I ? and another said, Is it I ? And he answered 
and said unto them, It is one of the twelve, that 
dippeth with me in the dish" (Mark xiv. 19, 20). 
This vivid self -questioning of the men, addressed as 
it is to Jesus himself, is surely a revelation at once 
of affection and sincerity. That men do abandon 
their ideals and betray their friends, we all know; 
for Shylock and Judas and many others are poten- 
tially within us. A man with any gift of imagina- 
tion and self-criticism will conceive with pain what 
he might do ; he would prefer to go with his friend 
to prison and to death, but he knows his weakness. 
That these honest, simple, friendly men turn with 
this question to Jesus is another proof of the rela- 
tions between them. 

Meantime one swift look had told Jesus that the 



112 THE PILGRIM 

worst was true ; Judas was betraying him. Matthew 
and John represent that words passed between them. 
Perhaps, but if the Gospel narratives telling of 
Jesus' power to read character are true, as it is hard 
to doubt — we could almost have guessed that he 
had it — one glance was enough. John tells how 
Judas went out. Luke tacitly implies it. 

At this point Luke tells us that the old contention 
broke out again, which of them should be greatest 
in the kingdom of heaven (xxii. 24; cf. ix. 46). 
Jesus tells them, with a hint of the playfulness which 
they knew, that the kings of the Gentiles are called 
Benefactors because they are so tyrannical, but 
things are to be otherwise with them; the world's 
order is to be inverted, the greatest is to be like the 
junior, to wait on the rest ; and he adds that he him- 
self is their servant. The reader wonders whether 
the passage belongs here; it would be difficult to 
prove that psychologically it is impossible, when 
we know how the minds of a family, for instance, 
all sharing a common tension, united in a common 
hope or fear, can find material for quarrel in what 
none of them care about — a proof more of strain 
than of anything else. If the contention arose, as 
Luke says, there was a charming tact in the way 
Jesus took to end it — proof at once of a heart at 
leisure from itself and a genuine knowledge of what 
his friends really were. It is here that he tells them 
how they had helped him. Cicero once wrote to a 



THE LAST EVENING 113 

lawyer friend who was for the time in Caesar's camp 
in Gaul, that he knew his friend's vanity — he would 
rather be consulted by Caesar than fairly gilded by 
him. Of course, and which of them would not 
rather have helped Jesus in work or difficulty than 
have judged a tribe of Israel without him? There 
is an idealism in men, and Jesus knew it and touched 
it. What we are to make of the promise of thrones 
and dominions after this, depends on how we inter- 
pret Jesus and on the weight we lay on his statement 
that the men have stood by him in temptation. The 
verses may be due to confusion, to the mixing of 
stories ; or they may genuinely belong here, in which 
case we shall have to decide whether to take them 
literally as they stand and suppose Jesus to be still 
on a low plane of Messianism — lower than, at any 
rate, some of the apocalyptic writers who trans- 
cended an Israelite millennium; or to suppose that 
Jesus used words in his own way and was under- 
stood by his friends as he knew he would be. Three 
ways of explanation are open, and all one need add 
is that literalism has never been a profitable inter- 
preter of genius, least of all in this case. Whatever 
he said and whatever he meant, if the paragraph 
be taken as a whole, its effect is to associate Master 
and disciple in the past and the present, and to hint 
that the relation is to continue wherever they are. 
Luke next tells us of the memorable words in the 



114 THE PILGRIM 

singular person addressed to Peter 1 — "Simon, 
Simon, behold ! Satan demanded you that he might 
sift you (plural) as wheat; but I prayer for thee that 
thy faith fail not ; and thou, when thou comest back, 
strengthen thy brethren" (Luke xxii. 31, 32). 
Jesus, like John Bunyan and others who have had 
the gift of interesting listeners and readers, had the 
habit of seeing things in pictures ; and here he seems 
to suggest the scene at the beginning of Job and an- 
other in the book of Zechariah (ch. iii.). Satan 
comes into the presence of God and stands with an 
insistent demand on the one hand, and opposite him 
is Jesus at prayer. To translate that "Satan obtained 
you by asking" with the margin of the Revised Ver- 
sion is possible but not necessary, so far as the Greek 
goes; it seems, however, bad theology and bad 
psychology. Satan never really "obtains" anyone 
except by asking the man himself; and there is no 
suggestion that he has obtained the eleven. If it 
is urged that he "obtained" Job under certain condi- 
tions, there appears to be nothing of a parallel here. 
From the lips of so clear a thinker and so genuine 
a friend, what can the passage mean but peril at 
hand, once more that reminder of temptation which 
fills the chapter? "But I prayed for thee" are surely 
words that the man, to whom they were spoken, 
could never forget. They show how Jesus individu- 

1 Here something of what has already appeared in "The 
Jesus of History" is handled again. 



THE LAST EVENING 115 

alized men, and they tell us how he had been spend- 
ing the mountain nights of prayer. Let a man pic- 
ture it with his own name set for Simon's, and 
reflect that Jesus sat alone with God, thinking out 
with God "my name"; what would it mean to 
him? And Jesus spoke so to Peter, not without 
foresight of what was to be that night, and the re- 
pentance of his friend. No wonder he bound men to 
himf 

The night was to bring Peter shame enough; and 
Jesus foresaw it. He had not lived with the child 
of impulse for nothing. With Peter it would be hit 
or miss, the bull's eye or off the target; if he went 
wrong, it would be wildly wrong; if he took to 
denial, there would be no limits in his denial, he 
could not do it once and let it alone. And Jesus 
knew it, and knew too the other side of the man's 
nature, loyal for all his spells of panic fear; 1 and 
before the fall occurs, he predicts the certain return 
and calls him to great service. He knew his man. 
The warning is lost on him, and he lapses into his 
superlatives on the spot. When the bad moment 
came, he gave way, lied furiously, and fulfilled the 
prophecy; "and the Lord turned and looked upon 
Peter" (xxii. 61), and Peter "came back" ; they 
understood one another. 

The verses about the purse, the shoes, and tKe 

1 Cf. the episode at Antioch, where Peter plunged, first one 
way and then the other, Galat. ii. n. Paul also knew Peter, 
and seems to have read him in much the same way. 



116 THE PILGRIM 

sword are not very clear. They key to them seems 
to be lost. I do not agree in the least with one 
interpreter who holds that Jesus lost his head for 
a moment, and finds comfort in the aberration. 
Mark's ending of the meal, with a "hymn" (Mark 
xiv. 26) Luke omits, but it will none the less be 
genuine, and it adds a touch to the story of the 
companionship that we have not elsewhere. It 
would probably be a psalm, something with God at 
the centre of it. 

The events in the garden are cut down by Luke or 
expanded by Matthew. There is again, twice over, 
the warning about temptation ; and Luke gives us a 
glimpse of the solitary agony, the sweat profuse and 
heavy, 1 the prayer on one note. An interpolator has 
brought in an angel, in a verse happily lacking in 
some manuscripts. Mark more closely touches what 
happened. After an hour the strain upon Jesus 
grows too intense, and he rises from his knees and 
seeks his friends; he wants them with him in his 
temptation once more. He finds them asleep. Could 
not Peter have kept awake one hour with him? 
Well, he understands; they were ready enough in 
heart, but weary bodies overpowered their will. 
Even here he saves their faces and goes back to 
his temptation, alone and without them. This hap- 
pened twice, Mark says. None of the evangelists 

a This, however, depends on a verse which stands textually 
with that which brings in the angel. 



THE LAST EVENING 117 

comments on his story, but the reader may. It 
should be noted that the cup might quite easily have 
passed ; he had only to rise from his knees and leave 
the garden; a night of walking, and the cup was 
gone — and how much else with it! He wrestles 
through, and alone. 

At last, and it must have been in measure a relief, 
he catches the sound of feet and knows what they 
mean. He goes for the last time to the disciples, and 
wakes them, and the crowd is upon them. He knew 
that Judas had brought them, but one thing he had 
not foreseen. There are decencies in dishonour for 
some men, but others do not care about them. Judas 
need not have been seen; the thick heavy stems of 
the olive trees in the garden might have been shelter ; 
the heavy black shadows of a night of full moon 
could have concealed him; but he was of a coarser 
make. He went directly up to Jesus to kiss him. 
Luke does not say with Mark and Matthew, that 
Judas actually did kiss Jesus. Without their ac- 
counts one would infer from Luke's turn of sentence 
(the infinitive of purpose) that Jesus saw what he 
meant to do, and saved himself from that touch. 
"Hail, master !" was enough. The cry breaks from 
Jesus, which we can believe authentic, and it reveals 
an unexpected humiliation and sorrow : "Judas, be- 
trayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" 

Here the scene changes and he is with his friends 
no more. But if the construction we have given 



118 THE PILGRIM 

to the data of Luke is right, and it seems natural 
and obvious enough, we have in the chapter a revela- 
tion of the inmost mind of Jesus. The story is not 
that told by St. John, but the keynote is the same. 
"With desire I have desired to eat this passover 
with you before I suffer/' Luke quotes the very 
words of Jesus; and John long after sums it all up 
in a judgment — a thing as beautiful as any in his 
Gospel, and as true history — "Jesus . . . having 
loved his own which were in the world, he loved 
them unto the end" (xiii. i). 



VIII 

THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 



The Council of Trent decided among other things 
that St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
There was a long tradition in support of that de- 
cision, going back to Clement of Alexandria, who, 
however, lives in virtue of other gifts than his 
criticism. But there is as good tradition warrant- 
ing doubt of the ascription. Origen, a junior con- 
temporary of Clement, and a much better judge in 
such things, holds that if Paul wrote the epistle, 
some Greek must have edited it, some amanuensis; 
but he concludes, "who wrote the epistle, God 
knows." So early was the style of the writer felt 
by those sensitive to such things. Later scholars in 
our own day analyse the vocabulary and find marked 
differences from Paul. The whole construction of 
the letter, however, all but cries aloud that Paul never 
wrote it ; when did Paul ever keep to so even a level 
of graceful language, or so consecutively adhere 
to a train of thought? Paul neither had the train- 
ing of this writer nor wanted it; 1 he is far swifter 
1 Compare i Cor. ii. 4. 
119 



120 THE PILGRIM 

in mind and intuition, sees things suddenly in a flash, 
and has a divine gift of being centrifugal, even if 
he always does come back to his ultimate centre. 
Nor are Paul's main ideas, nor his general outlook, 
to be found in this writer. 

Many have guessed at the name of the author, 
Apollos, Silas, Barnabas, and even Priscilla have 
been credited with the authorship, but the claims of 
Aristarchus, Timothy, and Onesimus are at present 
just as solid. We know nothing whatever of the 
literary capacity of any one of them. Apollos 
could preach with power; Aristarchus was a brave 
and loyal comrade; Barnabas was Jove-like, at least 
compared with the Mercurial Paul. 1 And there it 
ends. We have not enough knowledge to ascribe 
the letter to any person named in the New Testa- 
ment; it is equally plain that he is none of the 
writers who wrote the other New Testament books ; 
and we have no option but to leave his name where 
Origen left it, in the knowledge of God. 

The name does not greatly matter, though it would 
be convenient in speaking of the epistle and its 
writer to know it. But it is not the only book that 
has come down to us without a name and yet full 
of an autobiography. The date is established by 
the free quotation from the book as one accepted 
which we find in the letter of Clement of Rome, 
who wrote about a.d. 95. The race of the author 
1 Acts xiv. 12. 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 121 

is less easy to decide. It is urged that he knew 
the Old Testament well, but in Greek, following 
the Septuagint even in its blunders; that his 
knowledge of Judaism is book-knowledge; that he 
writes apparently for people whose acquaintance 
with Jewish law and ceremony would be helped by 
more explanation than we should imagine Jews to 
require; and he has no such sentiment about Israel 
as we find in Paul. If he was familiar with the 
methods of Philo in handling the Old Testament, so 
were others who used them and were undoubtedly 
Gentiles, like Clement of Alexandria. He may have 
been a proselyte, as Justin Martyr and Tatian were; 
and Justin had an extraordinary knowledge of the 
Old Testament. His Greek, Hellenistic as it may 
be, is purer and more genial, better every way than 
that of any other New Testament writer; and one 
may be forgiven for thinking that his tone of mind 
goes with it, and that he writes more like a Gentile 
than a Jew. No one would think of him instinctively 
as an Athenian; Alexandria suggests itself — prob- 
ably from the influence of Philo; but his place of 
abode or of origin must be left unknown. It is 
equally impossible to say to whom his letter was 
directed, if it was a letter at all, and not a tract or 
pamphlet thrown into letter form. 1 

That he was a man of culture is clear, a real 

1 The reference to Timothy (xiii. 23) suggests the letter; 
but the last four verses may be a mere note that was sent with 
the document (perhaps to one set of friends). 



122 THE PILGRIM 

Hellenist. That he read the Septuagint, and liked 
Philo's exegesis, we have seen. And it is surely 
not going too far to feel in his pages the direct or 
indirect influence of Plato. Whether Paul studied 
with Stoic teachers at Tarsus (which is doubtful), or 
read Stoic books (which is doubtful), his vocabulary 
and his ideas show Stoic terms and Stoic thought. 
'"Nature" was the very foundation of Stoic teach- 
ing, and "conscience" was a coinage of that school; 
and the man who uses the terms, and uses them with 
meaning and intelligence, can be said to have come 
under Stoic influence. It is much easier to suppose 
that the writer to the Hebrews had a personal 
acquaintance of his own with Plato ; but whether this 
is so or not, it is hardly fanciful to catch a remin- 
iscence of Plato's parable of the cave and the men 
bound in it who saw not things, nor models of 
things, but shadows of models, 1 when we read that 
the law had "a shadow of good things to come and 
not the very image of the things" (Hebrews x. i). 
It is noticeable, too, that while the Gospels speak 
of the Kingdom of God (or of heaven), for this 
Greek-minded man, the Kingdom becomes a city, 
which men seek ; and in both ideas he has Plato, one 
feels, in his mind, if not the words at least the in- 
fluence of Plato. "Plato," says Dr. James Adam, 

1 Plato, "Rep.," vii. 514 foil. Though Plato does not use 
elKova of the models, the word actually comes immediately in 
his text, meaning "parable" or "likeness," and Jowett translates 
it "image." 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 123 

"in the Republic is looking for a civitas del, new 
heavens and new earth, in which righteousness 
dwelleth (2 Peter iii. 13) ; and indeed, as the argu- 
ment unfolds itself, we behold the originally "Hel- 
lenic city 5 gradually changing into a celestial com- 
monwealth a TrapaSeiyna kv ovpavco, as Plato himself 
at last confesses it to be" ; 1 and in his commen- 
tary on the Republic (ix. 592 B) Adam refers to 
more than one passage of this epistle (xi. 16, xii. 
23, xiii. 14) ; 2 Plato again puts the idea of Welt- 
flucht before his followers ; we must direct our flight 
yonder with all speed, away from this world of sense, 
and the way of escape is to grow like God ( Thecztus 
176 A). Closely similar is the picture of the search 
for a city given by Lucian in his caustic parody, the 
Hermotimus. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note 
how this Platonized city of God has come down 
through St. Augustine, the poet Spenser, and John 
Bunyan ; and the last, we may be sure, drew all his 
Platonism from the epistle to the Hebrews, city and 
pilgrim and world-flight. It is something to have 
given the world of letters an eternal interpretation; 
it means that the man who does it has the feeling for 
ideas and the instinct for language. It also illus- 
trates the view that the mind of Jesus never got real 
expression in words and terms, till it was linked 

1 Adam, "Vitality of Platonism," p. 65. 

3 Plato's word demiurge appears in Heb. xi. 10; and other 
philosophic terms are quoted to establish the writer's "notable 
predilection" for them. 



124 THE PILGRIM 

with Greek. The city of God has been far more 
potent a conception and aspiration than the original 
kingdom, especially since the Apocalyptist gave it 
a name, the New Jerusalem; and he, we should re- 
member, wrote at a later date than our author, 
whether he knew him or not. 

There then is our scholar, and we have found him 
in his library. Others have tracked him to the school 
in which he studied; they have noted his modes of 
speech and given them the technical names which 
they bore in the schools of rhetoric. We need not 
linger over these, but it is easy to see that he learnt 
to write and was practised in expression. There is 
nothing ragged in his style; his ideas are ordered, 
his transitions well made, and his keynotes as they 
recur come in naturally and with force. 

He is a student of human nature, analytical of his 
own mind and feelings, on the whole mistrustful of 
himself and his impulses. He is conscious of the 
limitations of man's outlook; God may have put all 
things under man as the psalmist (Psalm viii.) had 
said, "but now we see not yet all things put under 
him" (ii. 8). He feels the need of "an anchor of 
the soul, safe and firm," an anchor in the world of 
the unseen (vi. 19). He emphasizes the craving 
for a conscience purified from a dead past to be able 
to serve a living God (ix. 14) } 3 man needs a full 
assurance of faith that his heart is "sprinkled from 
evil conscience/ ' rid, that is, of consciousness of 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 125 

evil (x. 22) ; and in his postscript, he hopes or even 
trusts he has a good conscience, at least, he wishes 
to live honourably in all things (xiii. 18). The 
failure of Judaism was that its sacrifices never did 
set a man free from consciousness of sin (x. 2). A 
note like this does not recur in a man's writing — in 
the writing of a man so skilled and so deliberate — 
without significance. 

He is sensitive to the insidiousness of temptation, 
and speaks with tenderness of the tempted in their 
need of help, and with gratitude to Jesus especially 
for his sharing the burden of temptation, to Jesus 
who knew it in the days of his flesh in bitter experi- 
ence, and helps his friends when they are in need 
(ii. 18, iv. 16). The sympathy of Jesus in this 
matter he sets out as movingly as Paul himself (ii. 
18, iv. 15). It is noticeable in this connexion that 
he uses the name Jesus by itself, more than other 
New Testament writers outside the Gospels. What 
his special temptations were, we may be able to guess 
later on. He knew also something of the fear of 
death, a fear contributory, Aristotle would tell us, 
to a genuine manhood, but a fear, which, our writer 
knows, may keep a man paralysed his whole life 
through (ii. 15). Above all he is afraid of apostasy. 
He realizes vividly what it means in the end, and he 
fears God; "it is a fearful thing to fall into the 
hands of the living God" (x. 31 ; cf. x. 26-31, vi. 6, 
xii. 17). He mistrusts himself, as we shall see, in 



120 THE PILGRIM 

a world where it is so fatally easy to drift. A 
"sombre" element has been noted in his conception 
of God; his view of sin and punishment, of inevi- 
table consequences, is as stringent as Plato's. As 
little as the great Athenian teacher can he believe that 
men may play as they please with God's laws. If 
this is sombre, then he is sombre ; but experience con- 
tributes such a character to the mind of a man who 
looks within and remembers God. There was, as we 
shall see, a good deal in his environment to give a 
serious, if not a dark, tinge to thought; yet his dom- 
inant note we shall find to be one of hope (vi. 18, 

i 9 ). 

Though he has read Plato and learnt from him, he 
is not greatly interested in philosophy or theology. 
He has a theology, a Christology at any rate, which 
is the outcome of experience and thought; but it is 
not that of the professed philosopher. In Philo he 
had fallen in with a bad school of exegesis, but he 
never loses his real meaning in subtleties ; x he retains 
enough of the Greek mind to know the difference 
between substance and shadow; his allegories do 
not obscure real issues for him. He is simple, sin- 
cere and direct ; he speaks out of experience and he 
thinks clearly ; he knows whom he has believed, and 
has a straightforward faith in Jesus. He is pre- 
pared to take risks both in life and thought for him, 

1 Unless we except the play with the two meanings of 
diatheke, covenant and testament. 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 127 

to try a new and bold experiment in religion, and 
he looks forward, in the old Athenian way, 1 with 
eyes open and head cool, to a very probable martyr- 
dom. If he is afraid of his own weakness, and 
afraid in another sense of God, he "will not fear 
what man shall do unto me" (xiii. 6). 

II 

The man is a scholar, a stylist, a man of books; 
and somehow he has been led into the region of 
experiment. He tells us nothing of his history, and 
it is impossible to guess what brought him into the 
Christian community. But we find him there and 
engaged simultaneously in two great questions, one 
in the sphere of religion, the other of character* 
He has to find a justification for the Christian faith 
in its great departure from all the world's religious 
traditions, and to combat all the temptations to in- 
ertia and drift that beset the life of man. 

It is hard for us after so many centuries of Chris- 
tianity to realize how strangely Judaism, and still 
more so the Christian faith, struck the world. This 
man's contemporary Tacitus made an epigram of 
Jewish religion, a temple without god or image, an 
empty shrine, non-existent mysteries. 2 The vulgar, 
and not they alone, dubbed the Christians atheists; 
they so obviously were — what else could they be, 

1 Cf. Thucydides, ii. 40. 
a Tacitus, "Histories," v. 9. 



128 THE PILGRIM 

who would not worship their neighbours' gods and 
had none of their own ? The absence of intelligible 
ritual provoked imagination, and a dirty fancy found 
rites for people who had none, in the legends of 
(Edipus and Tantalus. 

Religion had always implied temple, or at least 
altar, and it could not exist without priest and 
sacrifice. In fact, as our author says or quotes: 
"Without shedding of blood there is no remission" 
(ix. 22). To the ancient, with certain exceptions, 
the sacrifice was the essential thing in religion, the 
one means of approach to gods, which was inevitable 
and infallible. The exceptions were the prophets of 
Israel and some of the philosophers of Greece, who 
saw plainly enough that to God it was the heart and 
its change or development that really mattered; at 
best the sacrifice could only be a symbolic repre- 
sentation of this approach of heart and nature, and 
between minds, such as those that they saw God's 
must be and man's ought to be, symbols were not 
needed. 

It is an irony that has befallen other writers, that 
what they have written has been taken to support 
exactly what they attacked. 1 Our writer has been 
mishandled, and has become, in the hands of his 
interpreters, the prime advocate of a system of ideas 
which he clearly rejected, as if the Christian faith 
were only valid if it could be expressed in the terms 
*e.g. St. John vi. 56, 63. 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 129 

of the religions it was to abolish. He has been inter- 
preted as giving a sacerdotal and sacrificial character 
to the work of Christ, when it is fairer to hold that 
he maintains the work of Christ to supersede all 
sacerdotal and sacrificial conceptions. 

True, he takes in turn priest (vii. 18-27), sacrifice 
(viii. 3), sanctuary (ix. 1), and altar (xiii. 10), and 
in turn identifies Jesus with each, or more really 
finds that, whatever function each of these things 
was supposed to discharge, Jesus does discharge 
in a much more thorough way, once and for all. 
An illustration may serve here. Tacitus says that 
Augustus "drew to himself all the functions of Sen- 
ate, magistrates and laws" ; 1 Cicero after the death 
of Caesar had written to Plancus (of all people), 
"Be the Senate yourself' 5 — a shorter way of saying 
something of the same kind. When our writer 
speaks of Jesus as priest (vii. 24-28), passing 
through the veil, viz., his flesh (x. 20), by the sacri- 
fice of himself (ix. 26), with his own blood (ix. 12; 
xiii. 12), entering into the holy place (ix. 12) ; when 
he says we have an altar whereof they have no right 
to eat which serve the tabernacle (xiii. 10) ; it is 
plain that an educated Greek cannot think of these 
terms as denoting anything literal whatever. He is 
using analogy and illustration, and is no more to be 
taken literally than Jesus is, when he says that the 
kingdom of heaven is like a net in the sea, and leaven 
1 Tacitus, "Annals," i. 2. 



130 THE PILGRIM 

in the meal, and a man who found a treasure, and a 
king marrying his son. The images are not to be 
combined, consistently with sanity; and he was en- 
tirely sane and very clear. What the priest did, or 
was supposed to do, partially and ineffectually, for 
it needed constant repetition, Jesus did once for alL 
If shedding of blood is your sine qua non in religion, 
his blood was shed. With the prophets and Jesus 
historically behind him, it is hardly to be supposed 
that the writer really conceived of God as a being 
not to be satisfied without blood. And having begun 
to play with analogies, he adds the veil after the 
manner of the school, which surely shows how little 
he took all his analogies as expressing necessary 
modes of religion. A little study of Clement of 
Alexandria will show of what daring fancies the 
school was capable, without loss of intellectual clear- 
ness. It was a later and less Alexandrian age, more 
legal in training, more literalist in temper, that 
riveted on the Church allegories which greater men 
conceived and used, and dropped as they passed on 
to things deeper and more essential. 

When he comes to hard fact, our writer is per- 
fectly plain as to his meaning. Animal sacrifice is 
absolutely futile ; and any modern Christian, who has 
seen it, knows what the writer means, and how en- 
tirely right he is. "It is not possible that the blood 
of bulls and goats should take away sins' ' (x. 4) ; 
they are offered continually, which is in itself proof 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 131 

that they leave the conscience polluted and unhappy 
(x. 2), and they never do take away sins (x. 11). 
He is only reasserting what the great prophets had 
said, and the proof of it lies in his citation of the 
central thought of Jeremiah's message — the promise 
of the new covenant unlike the old in every way, 
non-sacrificial, inward, effectual (viii. 8-12; Jere- 
miah xxxi. 31 ff . ) . Nor is this the only passage of 
the Old Testament he quotes; for he draws from 
Psalm xl. verses to prove that God is approached not 
in sacrifices but through the will. The ultimate re- 
ligion must be one of the will, and it must be one 
that gets rid of sin forever. 

As for the law of Moses, he does not find it in such 
direct antithesis to the Gospel as Paul does. To 
him it is like the shadows seen by Plato's prisoners 
in the cave, a mass of inexact and therefore mislead- 
ing pictures, which do indeed correspond with reality 
but at a remove — not images, but shadows, vague 
and uncertain, things one can be glad to be done 
with. All rites become useless and obsolete when 
peace of conscience is gained, never to be lost again. 
The shadows are nothing, when the reality comes. 
The law vanishes away, grown old and obsolete 
(viii. 13). 

The reality is the bright personality of Jesus. He 
moves out of the realm of shadows and types into 
the highest and most real man can divine. It is Jesus 
doing the will of God, who does away with shadows 



132 THE PILGRIM 

— expressing and fulfilling God's nature, the "ex- 
press image" (character) of God (i. 3). The point 
is a difficult one to make clear; but in spite of 
Philonian exegesis his emphasis is plainly on the 
relation of Jesus to God, the obedience rendered by 
Jesus to God, the identity of will, the entrance of 
Christ forever into the presence of God once for all, 
his seat at the right hand of God. We touch here 
concepts not to be validly translated into the sym- 
bolism of Mosaic law ; and the appeal to the fortieth 
psalm takes the whole matter to a higher level. We 
have not yet a final account of "the work" of Christ; 
but as Christendom has entered into the mind of 
Jesus, it has moved further and further away from 
the whole range of ideas represented by sacrifice and 
altar. Our writer has to treat of sacrifice and altar, 
but he makes it evident that he himself thought 
essentially in other terms, or at the least had entered 
a train of thought which implied other categories. 
It is impossible for one long familiar with his Greek 
cadences on the priesthood, the intercessorship, of 
Christ not to love the thought ; and it may be inferred 
that he loved it himself. One must have some 
language in which to express the deepest feelings; 
and if our writer is steadily bringing his readers 
over to a new outlook, he still has to use a language 
that will stir their hearts. At the centre of every 
conception of priesthood is the idea of effective rela- 
tion with God. The old priesthood, the old sacri- 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 133 

fices, failed to bring this about for men; Jesus has 
done it once for all. If sacrifice expresses this 
achievement, he is our sacrifice; if priesthood, he is 
our priest; but none of these terms, nor all of them 
taken together, really express him. This our writer 
has seen, and it is misreading him to make him the 
pillar of a mode of exposition, the fundamental 
ideas of which he roundly calls obsolete. 



in 

Side by side with the theological problem of rela- 
tion with God on new lines, our writer feels the 
practical problem of the management of life. Those 
who never read the great books do not know their 
appeal; a man who never handles great ideas, who 
pursues no absorbing study, has little notion of how 
they can occupy mind and life, and how one can 
wake with a start to find one has drifted from one's 
centre. Attention means inattention ; and a scholar 
will realize with shame how the great and high in- 
terests of history and thought and science may so 
control him as to leave him inattentive to God. 
There are other things that lead to neglect (ii. 3), 
to drift (ii. 1), to coming short (iv. 1), to turning 
aside or wavering (x. 23), to dulness (nothroi, vi. 
12) and to forgetfulness (xii. 5), and thence to fall 
(iv. 11) and refusal (xii. 25). It is to be noted 
how this warning against inattention, with its in- 



134. THE PILGRIM 

sidious and unnoticed dangers, comes periodically 
through his writing, like a motif in a piece of music. 
Nor this only, but interwoven with it are other 
motifs, the emphasis on attention, on faith, and on 
the power of Christ. To track them as they come 
gives one a new sense of his gift in writing, as, not 
schematically, but naturally and (it might seem) 
almost unconsciously he recurs to his great notes and 
makes them felt, felt more than we at first have 
realized. 

The real danger before the Christian was apostasy, 
the final rejection of salvation, the acme of all that 
stains and ruins conscience, the doom a man writes 
for himself in a universe where God rules and where 
God, like a consuming fire (xii. 29, quoting Deut. 
iv. 24), destroys all that would frustrate His will, 
burns up the refuse and the waste of the world. No 
one would deliberately undertake to tread the Son 
of God underfoot (x. 29) ; no one would deliberately 
choose a lifetime of fearful expectation of judgment 
(x. 2j). Nemo repente fuit turpissimus, says a 
Latin poet, more or less contemporary, and no such 
reader of the soul as our writer. The greatest dis- 
asters of crime, of falsity, of apostasy, are those into 
which men drift. It is so easy to drift; and when 
suddenly the government calls for the Christian's 
blood (xii. 4), a man may have faltered, may have 
been startled into denial, before he is conscious of 
what he is doing. 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 135 

"Consider" (xii. 3), he keeps saying, "attend" 
(ii. 1), "study" (vii. 4), "remark" (iii. 1). His 
eleventh chapter is an appeal to history, to memory 
and the challenge of great examples. Elsewhere he 
bids his friends recall their own experience — those 
earlier days, when after the great enlightenment they 
had great practice or training in suffering; when 
men made exhibitions of them with taunts and per- 
secution and robbery (x. 32-34). Above all this 
they must get their eyes on Jesus Christ and keep 
them there. 

As a practical step, the simple and obvious means 
of keeping touch with the great story of Jesus and of 
concentrating thought upon him, he recommends 
steady adherence to the Christian community — "not 
forsaking the assembling of ourselves together" 
(x. 25). He emphasizes in the same verse preach- 
ing: — a Greek of the intellectual type, he prefers 
teaching and thought, the touch of mind with mind, 
to sacraments. He does not use of the Church the 
splendid language of Paul, still less the falutin of 
some second-century Christians. To him its real 
value is that of a community, a G^meinde, a society, 
of similar experience, similar needs, and a common 
faith in Jesus. But even Paul hardly surpasses the 
picture he draws of the Church invisible — "Ye are 
come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the 
living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an in- 



lag THE PILGRIM 

numerable company of angels, to the general 
assembly and church of the firstborn which are writ- 
ten in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to 
the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus" 
(xii. 22, 23). The angels here may be of Hebrew 
or Philonian origin; the rest is Greek. The "gen- 
eral assembly" is the panegyris of the Olympian 
games; the "Church" is the ecclesia of glorious 
memories of freedom ; and the citizens are registered 
in heaven, their rights assured. And he completes 
his picture of the Church with the presence of God 
and — in culmination — Jesus named by his earthly 
name. 

The need is urgent, the peril is imminent. Men 
must have their minds in working order ; they must 
concentrate attention ; above all they must have faith 
in the unseen. It is easy to lose this faith if one 
lives in study or even in comfort, if one lets attention 
wander to the pleasant and the fugitive. One feels 
that to a day like ours, the writer has a special mes- 
sage, and that his emphasis on the history of spiritual 
experience is our via prima salutis. The idealists 
cut odd figures in this world; did not Cleon in 
Athens, five hundred years before, touch them off? 
men "in bondage to whatever is exotic, to every new 
paradox, contemptuous of the ordinary, seeking 
something else (so to say) than the conditions under 
which we live, and unable to take in what stares them 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 137 

in the face." * Our author says very much the same 
thing about them, but with a sympathetic tone: 
"These all died in their faith, they did not receive 
what was promised, they only saw it afar off 2 and 
hailed it with a cheer, they admitted that they were 
foreigners and aliens on earth. Those who say such 
things declare plainly that they are still seeking 3 
a country; and truly if they had remembered the 
country whence they came they might have had op- 
portunity to go back to it. But in point of fact they 
desire 4 a better country, one in heaven. 5 So God 
is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has 
a city ready for them" (xi. 13-16). So far, for us 
who are still on earth, the only justification for the 
idealists is to be got from experience and from his- 
tory, and to history and "your own experience" this 
scholar goes. God, he maintains, is on the side of 
the idealists ; the City of God is built, is ready and 
waiting, and some men get a glimpse of it and salute 
it from afar nad set out for it — "seeking something 
different from the terms on which we live." In 
human history, he sees, it is the idealists who have 
done everything; God is not ashamed of them, He 

1 Thucydides iii. 38; I have given alternative renderings of 
the first phrase. Cf. J. B. Bury, "Ancient Greek Historians/' 
p. 115. 

2 "If the city had only been near at hand and plain for all to 
see," says Lucian in his "Hermotimus" 25, "but it lies far 
away!" 

3 Epizetein, almost Cleon's word, zetein, 

4 Oregontai, a good Thucydidean word. 

5 Plato again. 



138 THE PILGRIM 

has vindicated them again and again ; they have sub- 
dued kingdoms, achieved righteousness, got what 
was promised them, triumphed over brute beasts and 
brute men, and so forth; why should I try to para- 
phrase his Hymn for all Idealists (xi. 32-40) ? 
The last note of it is a splendid challenge; for all 
they did and achieved, God has something better for 
us, we are needed to complete them. 

History is full of comfort and inspiration, but he 
has something more to add. 



IV 

We have seen how our writer's great keynotes 
recur. One of them escapes nobody who reads the 
Epistle — his emphasis on remembering Jesus, con- 
sidering Jesus, taking note of Jesus. For him, in 
the long run, in thought, and in life or death, every- 
thing turns on Jesus ; every issue comes down to the 
practical concentration on Jesus, the eyes fixed on 
him in the race-course of life (xii. 1), and everything 
here and hereafter staked upon faith in him. 

He might vie with Paul in the splendour and in- 
tensity of the names he has for the Son of God, with 
all that such Sonship implies — crowned with glory 
and honour (ii. 9), entering the holy place with 
eternal redemption for us (ix. 12, no symbol, but the 
very presence of God, ix. 24), and not alone like the 
high priest of the Jews but bringing his friends em- 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 139 

boldened with him (x. 19), sitting on the right hand 
of God (i. 4, x. 12). Christ is "the brightness * of 
God's glory and the express image of his nature' ' 
(i. 3) ; he laid the foundations of the earth, and the 
heavens are the work of his hands (i. 10), and he 
upholds all things by his word of power (i. 3) ; he 
is the firstborn of God (i. 6). Not all these terms 
and expressions are new in religious thought; the 
reader may think of Philo, perhaps of the Stoics. 2 

But the glow and the affection with which he 
sweeps together everything that may help to bring 
Christ in his greatness and glory, flamingly into 
the heart of every man, these are new ; and they tell 
us something of the man — a great deal, in fact, of 
his experience and his passion. 

For this supreme Christ is no abstract dogma like 
the Logos of the philosophers. The names which 
our author gives to Christ in his relations with men 
are even more moving — a High Priest holy, harm- 
less, undefiled, out of the category of sinners, with 
no need every day to purge away his own sins be- 
fore he can deal with ours (vii. 26) ; Mediator of a 
new covenant, that better covenant which Jeremiah 
foresaw, under which every man will have God's 
laws written in his heart (instead of the defiling im- 
pulses we know now), and all men shall know God 
(viii. 6, xii. 24) ; the Surety of this covenant (vii. 

1 Apaugasma, a word from Wisdom, vii 26; see p. 158. 
3 A hint of Stoic phrase in ii. 10. 



140 THE PILGRIM 

22) ; the Author and Perfecter of the faith (xii. 2) ; 
our Fore-runner (vi. 20), and (in language per- 
haps borrowed from our Lord's parable recorded 
by Luke, for John's Gospel was yet to write) "the 
great Shepherd of the sheep" (xiii. 20). Every 
phrase again speaks of experience and feeling. The 
eternal Son of God is the pledge and guaranty for 
the salvation of men, mediator, fore-runner, intel- 
ligible to them and interpreter and representative 
of them; "He ever liveth to make intercession for 
them" (vii. 25). 

What differentiates him from Paul and other 
New Testament writers, apart from the evangelists, 
and at the same time gives him an appeal to our- 
selves, is the clear view he has of the sufferings of 
Jesus. He is himself a tempted and troubled man, 
and it is a help to him to realize how much of his 
experience repeats that of Jesus, and how much more 
of the same kind Jesus had. He keeps his eyes 
fixed on Jesus, as he puts it; and when nature fails 
to show all things subjected to man, "We see Jesus 
for the suffering of death crowned with glory and 
honour, that he by the grace of God should taste 
death for every man," we see him "perfected by suf- 
fering" (ii. 9, 10). Men are haunted with the 
fear of death, so Jesus tastes it for them and frees 
them from their fear (ii. 15). Men reel and 
sicken under temptation; Jesus knew temptation, 
and in virtue of his knowledge (gained in suffering) 



THE WRITER TO THE HEBREWS 141 

he can help the tempted (ii. 18). He is flesh and 
blood like the rest of us (ii. 14), and is taught by 
obedience (v. 8). Our writer keeps his eyes on 
Jesus in Gethsemane, "when he offered up prayers 
and supplications, with strong crying (on God) and 
with tears, to him who was able to save him from 
death, and was heard in that he feared" (v. 7). 
This is a remarkable note in the early church, and it 
suggests autobiography. Finally, he sees Jesus in 
shame and contradiction carry his cross without the 
gates (xii. 2, xiii. 12). And the keynote of all 
comes back to our memory, the note with which he 
began; it was all done by Jesus to cleanse the con- 
science from sin (i. 3), to give the peace a man can 
only have when guilt and defilement are gone for- 
ever (ix. 14, x. 2, 14, 17, 18, 22), to bring us indeed 
into the presence of God (ix. 24, x. 19). 

One more of his recurring notes remains, a steady, 
quiet, repeated insistence on the power of Jesus — 
power to help the tempted (ii. 18), power to sympa- 
thize with us and to understand us on the side of our 
weaknesses (iv. 15), power to have effective compas- 
sion on the ignorant and the muddled who lose them- 
selves (v. 2), power to save to the uttermost (vii. 
25), and (by implication) power to take away sin, to 
cleanse the conscience and to perfect (x. 10, 11, ix. 
9, x. 1). 

So he conceives of Jesus, and is prepared for the 
worst, — for a brave new experiment in religious life, 



142 THE PILGRIM 

'for the utmost of temptation, and for the naked 
horror of earthly death. The types and fancies all 
go; and at last he says, in a sort of religious nihilism, 
that he wants nothing but Jesus. The last extremity 
of isolation lies "outside the camp" ; outside the 
camp Jesus suffered in shame and loneliness ; "let us 
go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bear- 
ing his reproach" (xiii. 13). 



IX 

THE HOLY SPIRIT 

It is sometimes supposed that to examine the 
various stages of the history of an idea may lead, 
or must lead, to the idea being found untenable. 
Thus, in some men's opinion, if it can be shown that 
at an early stage all the religion we can find among 
a people was, so far as we know, associated with 
fetiches and taboos (to go no further), and was a 
matter of imperfect and invalid thought, then it is 
to be assumed that at all later stages the same may 
fairly be said of their religion. It is held that a 
stream cannot rise above its source; but metaphors 
do not always illustrate a case. A river may have 
many tributaries, and one of them may change the 
character of what we call the main stream. If a 
savage, for instance, be proved to associate any 
notion, which he so far possesses of the idea god, 
with a stone, it does not invalidate the idea to prove 
that the association is a wrong one. To disprove 
the existence of a god, more is needed than to show 
that men have blundered in their attribution of deity. 
Behind the blundering ascription, behind the con- 
fused thinking, there may lie the most dynamic of 

i43 



144 THE PILGRIM 

human convictions, that all life has to be associated 
with a powerful and persistent unseen element. To 
call this philosophy, and to urge that it has nothing 
to do with religion, is a mere matter of definition; 
and some thinkers, who suppose themselves liberal, 
fail to see that a man may be as doctrinaire and arbi- 
trary in definition or classification as any priest or 
obscurantist contending for a ceremony or a dogma. 
Historical inquiry, like all criticism, is directed to 
the learning of facts and sequences and to the clear- 
ing of ideas; it cannot alter facts, though it may 
affect our interpretation of them. In religion as 
in history the facts are of more import than our the- 
ories about them; and if the investigation of the 
history of men's judgment upon facts lead to a 
clearer grasp of those facts, the presumption is that 
it will lead to a sounder judgment, a view of facts 
that may in turn stimulate to fresh experiment upon 
them and to further discovery. 



When we turn to the Christian conception of the 
Holy Spirit, we are reminded at once that the doc- 
trine was formulated in the first three centuries of 
the Church, while it still lived in a world full of 
animistic ideas, and depended, in a degree to us 
surprising, on the inherited religious and philosophi- 
cal outlooks of an earlier age. We recall too that 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 145 

there was a Hebrew inheritance, like and yet unlike 
the Greek, already interpreted by non-Christians in 
Greek terms. Finally, we have to realize, if we can, 
the actual experience of the early Christian in street 
and home, in temple and amphitheatre, and to re- 
member the great transformation of everything that 
Christ had effected for him — a transformation less 
evident than it would have been, if it could have been 
described in a wholly new language. But it is only 
scientific men who use wholly new language, and 
their terminology gets sadly perverted when it 
reaches the lips of ordinary people. 

To modern readers, in whose minds the long drill 
of ages has effected some clarification, not always 
as valid or permanent as it seems, the dreadful con- 
fusion of ancient thought is amazing. When 
Homer, for instance, clearest and most lucid of poets, 
passes from description of life as men see it, of land 
and sea, home and battle, love and fear and death, 
and attempts to speak of the soul, we can no longer 
translate him with any assurance. The "souls" — 
or whatever the psychai are — of many goodly heroes 
are sent to Hades ; "themselves" are given to dogs 
and birds ; so the "Iliad" begins, as we remember, and 
it ends with the ghost of Patroclus ; but whether that 
ghost and the dead generally have or have not, as 
Achilles says, phrenes for all their retaining psyche 
and form, who is bold enough to decide? What do 
the words mean? 



146 THE PILGRIM 

Homer is essentially a modern. For the real 
ancients, as for the survivors of primitive man to- 
day, it was not clear what the psyche was. Are you 
your soul, or is it something different from you? 
Can you count on what it will do? Are you sure 
that your soul is really friendly to you? Then 
what happens when you faint or otherwise lose con- 
sciousnes in sleep or illness ? Where has your soul 
gone? When you dream, has your soul actually 
reached the places about which you dream ? And all 
the changes of mood and mind, depression, high 
spirits, madness, illness — how are they to be ac- 
counted for ? The obvious answer was that another 
spirit entered the man. The language has a modern 
sound, but it is an inheritance from the most distant 
ages. Why should a man in love, or a man drunk, 
differ in mind and speech and action from himself 
under normal conditions? Surely something has 
possessed him ; and there we touch a whole series of 
words, handed down to us from other days, and still 
preserving an early attempt at psychology — posses- 
sion, obsession, bewitched, nympholept, with influ- 
ence and enthusiasm at the end of the list, to add a 
respectability which they owe to a change of mean- 
ing and to forgetfulness. 

Not only things so normal as love and dreams and 
childbirth, but every psychopathic state, and perhaps 
every pathological condition, was attributed to the 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 147 

occupation of the man or woman by a daemon or a 
god. The daemon physically got inside the human 
and produced the change of mind, the loss of reason, 
the poem or the baby. Even when the true nature 
of child-bearing was understood, the old explana- 
tion was kept to account for the second child when 
twins were born. So confused are the early ideas — 
the origin of life, the origin of death, physical fac- 
tors to-day identifiable as infections, every exhilara- 
tion, — they are all attributed to one class of cause; 
and if we ask whether it is spiritual or physical, thg 
distinction is simply not made, not even thought of 
as yet. 

In the seventh and sixth centuries b. c. there was a 
great religious movement in Greece, associated with 
the name of the god Dionysus. Strange stories were 
told of the religious experiences, which men and 
especially women underwent, as the cult spread 
southward from Thrace, — how the worshippers 
gathered at night on the mountains, clad in fawn- 
skins and carrying ivy-wreathed wands, how they 
danced to the music of flutes and cymbals, how they 
tore living animals to pieces and ate them raw, and 
how a swoon would follow. These were the out- 
ward events. Men and women were stirred by the 
hope of union with the godhead ; and in the frenzy 
of the dance, amid the beat of the cymbals, the god 
possessed them, they grew conscious of him, felt 



148 THE PILGRIM 

him and attained beatitude. 1 Similar phenomena 2 
are recorded of many religions, and the common 
features are the group seized with the same idea, 
the stimulus, the weakening of inhibitory control, 
the surrender, the spread of the movement by imita- 
tion, the god-consciousness, and frequently, the same 
heightening of muscular power and other hypnotic 
effects. 3 The strange character of it all concen- 
trated attention on it and helped its spread ; and the 
difficulty of explaining the consciousness of contact 
with another life and the muscular feats, which even 
outsiders could verify, served to prove the truth of 
the explanation given — the access of a god and his 
entrance into his worshipper. 

The description which Virgil long afterwards 
draws of the Sibyl, when ^Eneas consults her, repro- 
duces the old belief and some of the constant accom- 
paniments. 4 

The sacred threshold now they trod; 
"Pray for an answer ! pray ! the God/' 

She cries, "the God is nigh!" 
And as before the doors in view 
She stands, her visage pales its hue, 

Her locks dishevelled fly. 
Her breath comes thick, her wild heart glows, 
Dilating as the madness grows, 

1 G. F. Moore, "History of Religion," i. 442; J. B. Bury, 
"History of Greece," 312. 
a Davenport, "Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals." 

3 Plato, "Ion," 534. The Bacchanal women draw milk and 
honey from rivers when under the influence of Dionysus, but 
not when in their right mind. 

4 Virgil, "yEneid," vi. 45 f., 77 f. (Conington's translation). 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 140 

Her form looks larger to the eye. 
Unearthly peals her deep^toned cry, 
As breathing nearer and more near 
The God comes rushing on his seer. 

She bids iEneas pray, and he prays ; and, as he prays, 
the possession becomes more complete : 

The seer, impatient of control, 

Raves in the cavern vast 
And madly struggles from her soul 

The incumbent power to cast : 
He, mighty Master, plies the more 
Her foaming mouth, all chafed and sore, 
Tames her wild heart with plastic hand 
And makes her docile to command. 

Professor Jevons quotes a parallel from modern 
Fiji, which describes how the priest trembles, how 
distortions of his facial muscles follow, and twitch- 
ing movements of his limbs, till the whole frame is 
violently convulsed, and it is recognized that the 
god is upon him and speaks through him ; there is a 
shrill cry, "It is I! it is I!"; the priest's eyes roll 
in frenzy; his voice is unnatural, his face pale, his 
breathing depressed, and his appearance like a mad- 
man's, as he sweats and weeps. 1 

It is quite well recognized that these phenomena 
can be induced, but that does not affect the interpre- 
tation. To the ancient, as to the savage of to-day, 
the matter does not admit of doubt. The person 
possessed is conscious of the god; and there is no 

1 Jevons, "Intr. to History of Religion," 273; Williams, 
"Fiji and the Fijians," i. p. 224. 



150 THE PILGRIM 

other obvious explanation; therefore that is the 
right one; the god enters the human being, and all 
that follows is natural and intelligible. The god 
therefore is real. Mystical vision gives the same 
results. The famous modern Bengali saint, Rema- 
krishna Paramahamsa, in one trance saw and spoke 
with Jesus (for three days) and in another saw Kali 
dancing on the body of her husband Siva; therefore 
both gods were real, both religions were true, and, 
by a swift inference, all religions were true, and per- 
haps equally true. Prophecy gives the same results ; 
where a prediction or a dream comes true, a god 
inspired or sent it; and Homer tells us how Zeus 
sent a lying dream to Agamemnon to spur him on to 
lead the Greeks to disaster. At Eleusis, Aristotle 
says, the participants in the mysteries were put into 
frames of mind and had feelings ; and that of course 
proved the validity of what the priests said; those 
feelings were produced by the goddess ; therefore the 
goddess was real, and men and women really had 
intercourse with her. 

It will be noticed that in all these cases the presence 
of the god is proved by physical evidence, or rather 
is inferred from an explanation, or lack of explana- 
tion (which is the same thing) of physiological phe- 
nomena. Perhaps the case of prophecy is not the 
same; it is at least a little more complicated. The 
oracles long served as proof of the reality of the 
pagan gods. The absence of any moral element is 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 151 

the common weakness of this type of religious ex- 
perience. 

Plato had no high opinion of prophets and their 
art; and though he used Orphic terms, for the 
Orphists and their followers he had very shrewd 
criticism. In the "Timaeus" (70, J2) his irony makes 
play with the mysterious nature of the prophetic 
gift. The authors of our being were charged by 
their Father to make the human race as good as 
they could; so they did something for our inferior 
parts too, and placed in the liver the seat of divina- 
tion; "and herein is a proof that God has given the 
art of divination not to the wisdom, but to the fool- 
ishness of man; for no man in his wits attains pro- 
phetic truth and inspiration ; but when he receives the 
inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled by 
sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or pos- 
session. And he who would understand what he 
remembers to have been said, whether in a dream or 
when he was awake, by the prophetic and enthusias- 
tic nature, or what he has seen, must first recover 
his wits. . . . Such is the nature and position of the 
liver." * Elsewhere Plato connects prophecy and 
lunacy (mantike and manike). 2 The poet, he says, 
is a light and winged and holy thing, but there is no 
invention in him till he has a god in him and his 
wits out of him. 3 If in the "Ion" Plato is laughing 

1 Jowett , s translation. 
2 Plato, "Phsedrus," 244. 
8 Plato, "Ion," 534 B. 



152 THE PILGRIM 

gently at the artistic temperament, none the less the 
combination is to be noted, the god in possession 
and the mind no longer in the man. 

In his very interesting tract on the "Cessation of 
Oracles/ ' written about ioo a. d., Plutarch gives an 
account of how a shepherd, called Koretas, came 
upon a jet or exhalation of some vapour near Delphi, 
and uttered words god-possessed (enthousiodeis), 
how people paid no attention, but were surprised to 
find that the words came true. "It is not to be won- 
dered at, if while earth sends up many jets (rheu- 
mata) , these are the only ones which bring the soul 
into an enthusiastic state, a state that can picture the 
future." Just as the eye is adapted to the light, so 
the body is constituted with regard to the prophetic 
spirit (mantikon pneuma). "The mantic jet and 
breath (rheuma and pneuma) is most divine and 
holy, and probably by heat and diffusion opens cer- 
tain pores, or channels (porous), that can picture 
the future." That we are right in treating the 
pneuma as something like a natural gas exhaled by 
the earth, Plutarch's explanation of its occasional 
failure proves, when he suggests that, just as hot- 
water springs sometimes fail and reappear, and as 
the silver mines of Attica were exhausted, so heavy 
rainfalls and thunderbolts or earthquakes may shift 
these exhalations or extinguish them. A speaker in 
the dialogue wants to know what becomes of gods 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 153 

and daemons if we resolve the prophetic gift "into 
breaths (pneumata) and vapours and exhalations.' ' * 
Of course the answer is ready; there is a double 
cause, a divine agent and a physical means, and so 
forth ; so that sacrifice does play a part in the obtain- 
ing of an oracle. 

I quote this interesting passage, because it puts so 
vividly before us the confusion between an exhalation 
of breath — or gas, in our modern vocabulary — and 
spirit, between the material and the spiritual. One 
word covers both, pneuma, and the jarring is not felt, 
probably because it was the prevailing philosophic 
belief that all existence was material. Two and a 
half centuries after Plutarch, Augustine tells us what 
a struggle he had to get away from the notion that 
God was infinitely subtle matter. 

To sum up, then, the world all around the Church 
believed in an infinite number of quasi-spiritual 
beings (if still somewhat material), gods and 
daemons, who could possess the souls and bodies of 
men and women, and give them, sometimes prophetic 
speech, sometimes disease or madness, constantly 
change of personality; but in general it is not sug- 
gested that these beings are necessarily moral, or that 
the effects of their entering into men and women are 
really ethical. Plutarch does all he can to moralize 

1 Plutarch de defectu oraculorum, Sections 42, 40, 43, 46; 
lying between pp. 432 D and 435 A. In 437 C he speaks of 
variations, of the temple being filled with fragrance and 
pneuma. 



154 THE PILGRIM 

his religion, but that was his own personal en- 
deavour. Many daemons were frankly immoral and 
evil, as he admits. The broad effects of this belief 
in possession by spirits were to stereotype the primi- 
tive traits in religion, to concentrate attention on 
ritual and the external, on the taboo instead of moral 
purity, and to emphasize the irrational as the highest 
expression of religion. Mystery became a syno- 
nym for esoteric knowledge, and feeling overbore 
thought and usurped its functions. Clarity was the 
enemy of piety, the intellect of the truest holiness. 



ii 

As the Hebrews knew many of the same phenom- 
ena and shared at first the same beliefs, some 
repetition may be avoided. The prophets, the 
schools of the sons of the prophets, of which their 
oldest books speak, practised inspiration on lines still 
maintained by the Semitic dervish, as the story of 
Saul reminds us. That unhappy king, with his 
tendency to madness, was naturally amenable to the 
influence of the nabi or prophet, and lost himself 
among them ; "the spirit of God came mightily upon 
him." * The abnormal psychical phenomena were 
the surest proof of the presence of the Spirit of 
God ; 2 the king prophesying naked and lying naked 

1 1 Samuel x. 10, xix. 20-24. 

2 Humphreys, ''Holy Spirit," p. 41. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 155 

on the ground a whole day and night was obviously 
inspired. We may compare the "parable" of a more 
professional prophet : 1 

The oracle of Balaam, the son of Beor, 
The oracle of the man whose eye is closed, 
The oracle of him that heareth the words of God, 
Who seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
Fallen down and having the eyes uncovered. 

Prophecy is associated with ecstasy and with posses- 
sion ; and at first, whether it is true or false, it is also 
associated with Jehovah. "The spirit of Jehovah 
had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from 
Jehovah troubled (or terrified) him. ,, 2 Jehovah 
sends "a lying spirit" to be in the mouth of Ahab's 
prophets and to deceive him. 3 Jeremiah fears that 
he himself may be the victim of the same fate. 4 The 
dream, too, is a regular instrument for the convey- 
ance of God's will. 

This is all very like what we find in the Greek 
world, in Fiji, in savage Africa. It was not at first 
that the prophets conceived of a God who would 
speak to a man when his wits were in him and he 
was awake. But the great prophets reached that 
point, and it differentiates them from the schools 
or droves of old-style prophets, whom perhaps we 
must not call impostors, but who certainly lent 

1 Numbers xxiv. 3, 15. 

2 1 Samuel xvi. 14. 

3 1 Kings xxii. 19-23. 

4 Jeremiah xx. 7; cf. p. 149. 



156 THE PILGRIM 

themselves to imposture. The conception which a 
man has of God is normative for the rest of his 
thinking; and the high view of God held by the great 
prophets went with the sanity of their prophecy. 
God was to be reached by the whole man at his high- 
est and best; and conversely, when the spirit of the 
Lord came on a man, with whatever excitation it 
came, it claimed the whole of him, intuition, insight, 
reflexion and reason. 

How they would have defined "the spirit of the 
Lord/' it might be difficult to guess; it is not a phrase 
for which men usually ask definition ; in this region 
of thought and experience, we are conspicuously 
driven to metaphor. The "breath of the Lord" 
might be a more literal rendering, but it would not 
tell us anything further. "Influence," the vague, 
modern word, is also indefinite, till we know what is 
supposed to "flow in" from the one to the other. 
However, just as the heathen gods were believed to 
enter their devotees, so men at first believed the 
spirit of Jehovah to affect His adherents in mental 
disorder and eccentricity. 1 When the great prophets 
put forward another view of inspiration, one feature 
of the older belief remained and acquired a new 
significance; there was a personal contact between 
God and the man He "took," 2 closer, more intimate 
and more real, for it meant conference and com- 

1 To this day we are told that the Arabs regard the insane as 
the special wards of God and not to be harmed by man. 
a Amos vii. 15. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 157 

munion between God and man on the highest themes 
and in the highest way, and left no shame behind. 1 
It is to be noted that while "the spirit of the Lord" 
is a regular phrase in the Old Testament, the com- 
bination "Holy Spirit" only occurs in two passages. 2 
One effect of the rise of Monotheism in the period 
after the Exile, was the growth of a feeling that God 
must not be brought too rudely into contact with the 
world of sense. The days were past when God 
would breathe into the nostrils of a creature His 
hands made, when He would walk in a garden with 
footsteps that could be heard. Intermediaries 3 were 
sought for the lowly work of creation ; and between 
God and man stood His Wisdom, His Glory, 4 His 
Name, 5 and the Law. 6 For our purpose the Wis- 
dom of God is of more significance, personalized, 
like some of these other conceptions, first by poetic 
feeling, and then by philosophic fancy. "Wisdom is 
a spirit that loves man." 7 

Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; 

Yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of 
her pureness. 

For she is a breath (ar/us) of the power of God 

And a clear effluence (airoppoia) of the glory of the Al- 
mighty; 

1 Cf. 2 Samuel vi. 22. 

2 Psalm li. 11; Isaiah lxiii. 10, 11. 

3 See J. P. Peters^ "Religion of the Hebrews/' 392, 393. 
4 Tobit xiii. 14, xii. 15. 

5 Tobit xiii. 11, viii. 5. 

6 The law becomes the light that lightens every man, "Test. 
Levi," xiv. 4. 

7 Wisdom i. 6. 



158 THE PILGRIM 

There can nothing defiled find entrance into her, 
For she is an effulgence (airavyaaina) from everlasting light, 
And an unspotted mirror of the working of God 
And an image (eU&p) of His goodness. 
And she, though but one, hath power to do all things, 
And remaining in herself reneweth all things; 
And from generation to generation passing into holy souls, 
She maketh them friends of God and prophets. 
For nothing doth God love save him that dwelleth with 
wisdom. 1 

So writes the author of "The Wisdom of Solomon." 
Mr. Fairweather, on the writer's data, finds Wisdom 
in some midway position between an attribute of 
God, a poetic personification, and a divine personality 
subordinate to God; and as such a personality 
Wisdom, according to the judgment of another 
scholar, is clad with all the attributes of Deity. The 
alternatives seem to a prosaic mind, trained in Greek 
ways of thought, to be mutually exclusive; but in 
this sphere literalism is predestined failure to capture 
the idea. At another place the writer borrows the 
greatest of all Greek words, and calls Wisdom "thy 
almighty Logos" (xviii. 15) — an identification fruit- 
ful in theological thought; and in yet another place 
he asks, "Who knew Thy counsel, except Thou hadst 
given Wisdom, and sent Thy holy spirit (to ay iov aov 
irvevfia) from the highest?" (ix. 17). As the 
long passage already quoted attributes to Wis- 
dom the making of prophets, it is an easy transition 
to that standard belief, which we find as an axiom 

1 Wisdom vii. 24 ff. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 159 

of general acceptation in the New Testament, that 
the Scriptures are the work of the Holy Spirit. 

The Hebrews travelled a long way from the gross 
and crude conceptions with which they started, and 
developed an idea of divine relations with man, 
which, in spite of obvious confusions, proved of real 
value. 

in 

When we come to the New Testament, the first 
thing is to look at our authorities j 1 and, classifying 
them on the basis of their references to the Holy 
Spirit, we obtain a curious and new grouping of 
them. The Synoptic Gospels are generally and 
properly classed together, but in regard to the Holy 
Spirit Mark and Matthew are alike in the fewness 
of their allusions (apart from the birth, the bap- 
tism, and the temptation), 2 while Luke is in striking 
contrast. There are passages in Matthew where 
Dr. Denney 3 finds a colour from the language of a 
later day (vii. 22), but elsewhere that colour is re- 
markable by its absence, a guaranty of historicity 
(xvi. 18 if., xviii. 15 f., passages dealing with the 
"church" ) . The trinitarian baptismal formula at the 

1 In what follows I draw a good deal from Dr. James 
Denney' s article on the Holy Spirit in "The Dictionary of 
Christ and the Gospels''; references will be given briefly with 
his name and the page and column of that work. 

a Mark six (one ref. to O.T.) ; Matthew eleven (with same 
ref. to O.T.). 

8 Denney, pp. 734 b, 735 a. 



160 THE PILGRIM 

end, there is some reason for believing to be a 
revision after the Council of Nicsea, though this is 
disputed. Luke, 1 on the other hand, is greatly inter- 
ested in the Spirit and finds a place for it at a 
number of points in the experience of Jesus — at the 
temptation, both where it begins and ends (iv. I, 
14) ; his rejoicing in the Spirit (x. 21) ; the substi- 
tution of the Spirit for the "good things" which 
God will give (xi. 13); and "the promise of my 
Father," viz. "power from high" (xxiv. 49) ; in the 
Acts the manifestations are naturally much more 
striking and numerous. Paul's writings abound in 
thoughts of the Holy Spirit, mentioned, it is said, 
one hundred and twenty times. The writer to the 
Hebrews in general is silent, 2 while the fourth gospel 
is written largely on the basis of the Spirit as the key- 
note of the new religion. 

In the Gospels there is a very remarkable absence 
of the phenomena associated with the Spirit in the 
first century Church. That the contrast was felt by 
the early Christians is shown in their emphasis on 
Pentecost. The historian will feel a parallel between 
some of these manifestations in the Church and those 
noted in Greece and, else where, and described in the 
story of King Saul and in the iEneid. The nearest 
thing to them in the life of Jesus is the statement 
of Luke that "he rejoiced in the spirit," though here 

1 Denney 735 a. 

3 Of the seven references to the Spirit in Hebrews, three 
refer to the Scriptures or the tabernacle. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 161 

another translation is possible if not probable, and a 
single passage and a doubtful piece of translation are 
hardly warrant for; bringing him into line with 
demonstrations which the greater prophets did with- 
out, which the Church soon outgrew, and which are 
not akin to his general mind and character. 

Dr. Denney, a scholar who had a name for caution 
and for essential orthodoxy, has a paragraph on this 
matter, which with reserve and sanity puts the case 
admirably. "If, then, we try to sum up the oldest 
Evangelic representation, we can hardly say more 
than that the Holy Spirit is the Divine power which 
from his baptism onward wrought in Jesus, making 
him mighty in word and deed — a power the charac- 
ter of which is shown by the teaching and by the 
saving miracles of Jesus — a power to which the 
sanctity of God attached, so that it is Divine also in 
the ethical sense, and to blaspheme it is the last de- 
gree of sin — a power in which Jesus enabled his 
disciples in some extent to share, and which he 
promised would be with them in the emergencies of 
their mission — a power, however, which (contrary 
to what we might have anticipated), the Evangelist 
[Mark] does not bring into prominence at any of 
the crises or intense moments of Jesus' life. It takes 
nothing less than that life itself, from beginning to 
end, to show us what the Spirit means. If the last 
Evangelist tells us that the Spirit interprets Jesus, 



162 THE PILGRIM 

the inference from the first is that Jesus also inter- 
prets the Spirit, and that only from him can we know 
what it means." 

IV 

In the early Church we find ourselves in confu- 
sion, of which, it is well to remember that Paul says 
God is not the author (i Cor. xiv. 33) — and this in 
a passage where he is speaking of spiritual mani- 
festations. It is quite plain that the followers of 
Jesus in Jerusalem and in Corinth did not move on 
his plane of intellectual clarity. They grouped a 
great many of their experiences together and at- 
tributed them all to the Holy Spirit. First and most 
obvious were the psychopathic; speaking with 
tongues and speaking in ecstasy impressed them, as 
they did the heathen around them, and as they have 
since impressed Christians in England and America, 
and in the nineteenth century. 1 To us these things 
are evidence only of disturbance, to them they were 
proof of the presence of the Spirit. Prophecy, 
which Paul distinguishes from ecstatic speech, was 
as mysterious and as convincing ; and there were con- 
verts who brought over from heathenism mystical 
ideas not found in the Synoptic Gospels and not very 

1 Once more let me refer to Mr. Davenport's most interest- 
ing book, "Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals" (Macmillan 
Co., New York). He gives a good many instances of such 
phenomena. John Wesley's "Journal" will also occur to 
readers, and the strange happenings in his early ministry in 
the neighbourhood of Bristol. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 163 

cognate with the teaching of Jesus. "The kingdom 
of God is not eating and drinking," said Paul (Ro- 
mans xiv. 17), but men and women, trained in 
heathen circles to believe that with food a daemon or 
a god might easily, and often did, enter the human 
system, took naturally another view of the Holy 
Spirit and its influence, and of the sacrament. 

But if the early Christians shared so far the 
psychological views of their contemporaries, there 
were things associated by them with the Holy Spirit 
quite distinct from the psychopathic. Most impor- 
tant of all is conversion. The phenomena that ac- 
company conversion and even conversion itself are, 
as we learnt from Dr. William James' famous book, 
not peculiarly Christian. Yet the conversion to 'a 
belief in Christ, with the moral changes which it 
inaugurates, with the uplifting conviction, the free- 
dom (2 Cor. iii. 17), and the confidence in God 
(Rom. viii. 14), belonged to another order of things 
than the tongues and prophecies, and deserved the 
attention and the ascription it received. What else, 
they might well ask, could guarantee the eager sense 
of being the children of God (Rom. viii. 16) — of 
being free from the burdens of the law and (more 
wonderful) from all that is summed up as "the mind 
of the flesh" (Rom. viii. 6-9), from the degrading 
impulses, and from the haunting sense of condem- 
nation (Rom. viii. 1, 30) — of being free in prayer, 
free in outlook — of being safe and assured against 



164 THE PILGRIM 

all the ills of this world, against assaults of "princi- 
palities and powers" here or hereafter, in the love of 
Christ — of victory beyond one's dreams? The 
eighth chapter of Romans is not a theoretical pic- 
ture; it is the autobiography of one of the greatest 
and profoundest men in history, and it above all 
other writings tells the tale of the new life. If the 
early Christian grouped all this with tongues and the 
rest, we need not; and if we find an explanation for 
the glossolaly, we are bound to try to find one for the 
change that Paul experienced from death to life. 
The two groups of experiences do not stand together. 
This indeed Paul saw. He speaks of the fruits of 
the Spirit as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-government 
(Gal. v. 22, 23) ; and among the gifts of the Spirit 
he reckons such things as the word of wisdom, the 
word of knowledge, faith, and the faculty of telling 
the difference between one spirit and another ( 1 Cor. 
xii. 8-1 1 ). All these are of one category, gifts that 
make the reality of life, without which men will not 
be really human. The list is not very Greek; it 
includes virtues and graces not much cultivated by 
the Greeks and rather forgotten by the Stoics them- 
selves. But among them we must particularly no- 
tice the last-named. It was above all things needed 
in that early church. Paul surprises us by con- 
fessing that he himself "spoke with tongues" (I 
Cor. xiv. 18), and giving thanks for it ; but he clearly 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 165 

prefers to speak intelligibly. Even if he does speak 
with tongues — tongues of men, if that is what they 
prove to be, or tongues of angels, which sounds like 
a quotation from somebody addicted to unintelligi- 
bility (i Cor. xiii. i) — love matters a great deal 
more ; tongues will cease, love will abide ( I Cor. xiii. 
8, 13). One of the tasks of love is to help other 
people, and to be intelligible to them especially on 
the greatest of themes ; sanctified sense was what the 
Church needed, the gift of distinguishing between 
spirits. For it is plain that otherwise the Church 
would be swamped with foolery and blasphemy (1 
Cor. xiv. 23, xii. 3). 

When once then the noisier and more trivial mani- 
festations are put in their place, whether they come 
from the Holy Spirit or some other spirit or are, as 
we might say, pathological, there remains the task 
of explaining the very great new gifts of the Church. 
With the language of the Old Testament written in 
the very hearts of Paul and the other Christian Jews, 
certain modes of speech were inevitable. Take the 
language of Isaiah, and read it with the commentary 
afforded by "The Wisdom of Solomon'' (a book 
very familiar to Paul), and the ascription of the new 
life to the Spirit of God cannot be resisted. There 
was fluctuation as to the right way of naming it. 
iLuke, in some texts, calls it "the spirit of Jesus" 
(Acts xvi. 7) ; and Paul at times identifies the Spirit 
and the Lord (2 Cor. iii. 17, 18) ; he urges now that 



166 THE PILGRIM 

"the spirit of God dwells in you" (i Cor. iii. 16), 
now that "Jesus Christ is in you" (2 Cor. xiii. 5) ; 
he prays that his friends may be "strengthened with 
might by God's spirit in the inner man" and in the 
next sentence that "Christ may dwell in their hearts 
by faith" (Eph. iii. 16, 17), and then immediately 
equates knowing the love of Christ, and being filled 
with all the fulness of God (Eph. iii. 19). 

Greek theories of the world and of life pointed the 
same way. The Stoic never tired of telling men 
that they were fragments of God, particles of divine 
breath; and this was not mere rhetoric, but part of 
a thought-out system. Through all nature went a 
Logos — a word or principle, intellectual, assimilable 
by the mind; it was spermatikos, life-giving, the 
germinal secret of all life, and it was in man. Sen- 
eca wrote to Lucilius that there is "a holy spirit 
dwelling within us — our guardian. . . . None is 
good without God." 1 It is true that the same claim 
might be made — would be made — by the Stoic for 
every animate creature and inanimate. The Stoic 
and the Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit 
were really quite different; the one relates it to all 
life, the lowest included, and involves it in the mean- 
est and the wickedest actions ; 2 the other finds the 
highest life alone in the Spirit and not elsewhere. 

1 Seneca, "Ep." 41, 1, 2. 

2 This was pointed out by Plutarch in his tracts criticising 
the Stoics, and by Clement of Alexandria; "Conflict of Re- 
ligions," p. 97. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 167 

There is a gap between Greek and Hebrew here ; and 
the Greek will say that the Christian view is not free 
from vagueness, there is something undefined 
about it. 

To this there is a twofold reply. There is a great 
deal that is undefined about the early Christian doc- 
trine of the Spirit; "it doth not yet appear what 
we shall be" (i John iii. 2) ; and in Paul's words but 
"God has given the earnest of the spirit in our 
hearts" (2 Cor. i. 22), the "earnest of our inherit- 
ance" (Eph. i. 14), while the fourth gospel attributes 
to Jesus himself the promise that the Spirit is to 
"guide you into all truth" (or "in all truth," John 
xvi. 13). How can men be precise till they have the 
whole of the facts before them? But, meanwhile, 
the second line of reply is stronger. The people 
who use this language are trying to translate into 
words equal to conveying their meaning a new ex- 
perience that eclipses everything they have known. 
If a man is "born again," is "a new creation," if 
he has repeated in everyday life the mystical experi- 
ence of Paul, and lives in the vision of things un- 
speakable (2 Cor. xii. 4), in joy unspeakable and 
glorified (1 Peter i. 8), how is he to express or 
account for what he only realizes with surprise and 
a constant sense of more beyond? Is it of God this 
new life? There are the splendid crop of new vir- 
tues, the manhood, the power, the other obvious 
signs of development and arete; if it is not God Who 



168 THE PILGRIM 

ministers them to man, where do they come from? 
But if after all God is coming into a man, as they 
used to believe that daemons did, and is expelling the 
daemons and their products, and filling a man with 
Himself, how is it to be expressed? Paul is like a 
man in love, too sure and too happy to analyse or 
define; more tongues than the "glossolalies" will pass 
away, vocabularies wear out and definitions grow 
old, but "who shall separate us from the love of 
Christ ?" (Rom. viii. 35). Whether this is a proper 
reply or not, in our judgment, may perhaps depend 
on whether we put experience or definition first. 
Both are good. The early Christian, when asked for 
an explanation, said "God" ; and if it was not clear 
how the great and ultimate God could come into a 
man, there was the great religious speech of the 
Hebrews available. God, Christ, the Spirit — which 
did he say? Well, all of them, any of them; it 
was the same thing, unspeakable. 

v 

It is a long way from this point of view to the so- 
called Athanasian Creed, with its language definite 
as a philosopher's and precise as a lawyer's, and a 
menace in every syllable. Yet we can see how that 
distance was traversed, and we shall remember that 
no definition is necessarily final, that menace is not 
the language of philosophy or of the Gospel. If 
Athanasius might champion a view of Christ contra 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 169 

mundum, we have at least the same right to cross- 
examine him on his grounds of belief. It is not a 
new discovery that the Christology of the New 
Testament is not Athanasian. The Athanasian 
Trinity may indeed be a true and necessary outcome 
of the premises yielded by the experience described 
in the New Testament; it may prove that there is 
ultimately no true philosophy of the universe but on 
the lines indicated in that creed; and if that be the 
case, whether we like it or not, some fundamental 
loss will be involved in a man's rejection of the real 
interpretation of God. 

Meanwhile, however, the creed, as it stands, is in 
a foreign tongue, doubly or trebly foreign. A 
philosophic training is needed if we are to under- 
stand the Greek of Athanasius ; and his Greek is at 
once old and not old enough; he is thinking in the 
categories of an age of tradition, using his terms 
with precision and clearness, but perhaps with more 
precision and clearness than a greater or more orig- 
inal thinker would manage or allow. All our 
categories, all our modes of thought, our preconcep- 
tions are changed ; it is not necessary to say that they 
are inevitably sounder than those of Athanasius; 
that is the language of extreme youth in every 
period ; but we think on different lines, and are really 
more at home with Plato than with Athanasius' con- 
temporaries who called themselves the New Plato- 
nists. Then the language of Athanasius is translated 



170 THE PILGRIM 

into Latin, and that not the Latin we know best; 
and from Latin long ago, as much by transliteration 
as by translation, it reached English; and English 
has changed a good deal since those days. What 
are we to say to a creed, distant by so many removes 
from the language we use and the thoughts we 
think? 

We have to remember that behind the theory of 
the Church lies experience, and another man's theory 
is not of much value to me without his experience. 
[What is it that Athanasius, or the Church is trying 
to convey to us ? That is one question, and a more 
urgent one is : What is the experience, what are the 
vital facts, that lie behind that language ? 

From one point of view the theory of the early 
Church on the Holy Ghost is very mechanical. A 
cup cannot simultaneously be full of (let us say) 
ink and of coffee; if you want to fill it with coffee, 
you must pour out the ink, and vice versa. Here is 
a man full of sin (no mistake about that) ; to make 
him full of righteousness, you must get out of him 
the daemon that makes him bad, but you must not 
leave him empty, he must be spatially filled with 
another spirit, the spirit that produces righteousness. 
The laws of space and matter forbid both spirits 
being there together. The ancient attribution of 
material substance to what they called spirit had its 
part in shaping their doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 
Some even held that in some way the Holy Spirit 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 171 

was actually conveyed materially to the baptized by 
the water of baptism. The oddness of their doctrine 
of these alternative spirits is given by their material- 
ism ; but beside the oddness, there is truth. A par- 
able of Jesus suggests that a man cannot safely 
remain empty ; l positive active good is the only way 
to get rid of evil — the interest of the man must be 
put actively on to something new and good. We 
hold, and we find evidence for it in the teaching of 
Jesus, that the evil in a man is not the intrusion of 
an alien daemon, but an expression of something that 
is (at any rate for the time) himself. Space and 
matter are not involved ; but there must be a change 
of interest and attention. As Seeley said, no virtue 
is safe that is not enthusiastic; and if his adjective, 
natural and instinctive, recalls to us in this connexion 
its ancient meaning, it is still true — perhaps we shall 
say, truer. 

The mechanical look, given by their materialism 
to their psychology, is not its most important fea- 
ture. There are few thoughts so often or so beauti- 
fully emphasized by Plato as his belief that man is 
not an earthly but a heavenly plant, 2 born to be on 
terms of intimacy with God and to become like God, 3 
that there is an essential aptitude between God and 

1 Luke xi. 24-26. 

3 "Timseus," 90 A; on the parallels between Plato and the 
N.T. on this point, see Adam's "Religious Teachers of 
Greece," 436-7. 

•"Theaetetus," 176 B. 



172 THE PILGRIM 

man, and that the real norm of human life, as of all 
else, is God. 1 This is the fundamental belief under- 
lying all religion — that relation between God and 
man is inevitable. The kinship in mind and ideas 
between God and man is Plato's contribution. How 
Jesus brought this kinship, re-in forced and height- 
ened every way, into the hearts of men, the Gospels 
tell us ; and the Christian community expressed it in 
one aspect in this doctrine of the Holy Spirit, in 
another in that of the Incarnation. 

It is hard to imagine a stronger ground for believ- 
ing a doctrine true than the visible transformation 
by it of character on a large scale, similarly over 
great areas and long periods, and among peoples of 
the most different racial and intellectual antecedents. 
What impressed the early Christian will still impress 
anyone candid enough to attend to it. The real 
struggle at Nicaea was over the Son, not over the 
Spirit. To-day the doctrine of the Holy Spirit suf- 
fers from its schematic precision, and from all the 
intellectual play that has been made by theologians 
with the number Three. Probably if it were again to 
formulate, it would take some different shape. But, 
important as adequate expression is for an idea, the 
form is not the supreme thing, but the fact which 
we are trying to express; and, if that relation 
between God and man, which the Church taught in 
its doctrine of the Holy Spirit, be not true, it is hard 
l "Laws," 716. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 173 

to see how religion can endure. But man has never 
believed that anything real is unintelligible ; and the 
greatest venture he has made has been to assume 
that he can understand God. Jesus' whole life was 
given to demonstrating it, and history shows that the 
venture has been justified. 



THE STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 

This story is a page out of the history of the 
Christian Church, or, to be strictly accurate, it is 
more like a page of a scrap-book. The scraps 
joined together here are all genuine, if what holds 
them together is conjecture. There was a statue 
made of the Good Shepherd or a wall-carving, and 
fairly early; perhaps not first in North Africa. But 
in any case it was made. The authentic first exam- 
ple of it may very well have perished ; none the less, 
at or about the period with which we are dealing, a 
man had the conception, which, under his own hand 
and tool, or under the hand and tool of another com- 
missioned by him, took the form which established 
the type. "A man of sense," says Plato, in the 
"Phaedo," speaking of one of his myths, "ought not 
to say, nor will I be too confident, that the description 
which I have given ... is exactly true. But I 
do say that ... he may venture to think that some- 
thing of the kind is true." x The scraps joined 
together come mostly from Tertullian; some come 
from his contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, and 
1 Plato, "Phaedo," 114. 
174 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 175 

from other early Christian writers. The function 
of art, as Longinus says, 1 is to seize the vital ele- 
ments and combine them so that the product lives. 
It is at least a high ideal to set before oneself. 

There was, then — or let there have been — a sculp- 
tor in North Africa, not a great artist, no Michael 
Angelo, but something like those who to-day in 
England have their shops within a hundred yards of 
every considerable cemetery, who make conventional 
angels kneeling in prayer or hovering over a strong 
marble support, crosses, urns and broken columns 
and the like. In India they are still making gods, 
and doing it to pattern ; holy men of old, we are told, 
invented the designs and they are still kept, and the 
first thing the sculptor has to do to make an idol is 
to get out his pattern. The man was rather the 
artisan than the artist, but this is not to say that he 
had no turn for his trade. Like Lucian the satirist, 
he may have been put in an uncle's shop, because as 
a schoolboy he would scrape the wax from the wax- 
tablet that served him for a slate at school, and 
mould it into figures; but unlike Lucian, who ran 
away when his uncle grew angry at a clumsy break- 
age, this man who had no turn for books and litera- 
ture stuck to his trade. 

^Esop's fables give us as good a picture of him as 
we need. The god Hermes or Mercury, he tells us, 
became a little self-conscious, and wanted to know 
1 See p. 264. 



176 THE PILGRIM 

how men thought of him, what value for instance as 
compared with the other gods they set upon him. 
He dropped down to earth and went in disguise 
through a city till he found a sculptor. Through 
the open side of the shop he saw a number of gods 
standing there, and one of them was himself. So 
the god went in to see the sculptor, and, being the 
god of thieves and of shrewd people generally, he did 
not begin with the question he wished answered. 
He strolled about the shop and looked at the statues, 
and by and by asked the price of Jupiter. So much, 
said the sculptor. "Ah! and Juno over there, how 
much is she?" Such and such a price. "And 
Hermes ?" "Look here!" said the sculptor, "if you 
will buy Jupiter and Juno, I'll throw Mercury in." 
And .Esop draws a moral which need not detain us. 
That was the kind of sculptor ; given the marble and 
the pattern, he could repeat a piece indefinitely, and 
much on the same level, each copy about as good as 
the one before it. 

He was a man of the people (de vestris sumus), a 
decent, kindly sort of man, judged by the common 
standards, which would not be too high. Living in 
a heathen town he took his pleasures as they came, 
the pleasures of heathen mankind of that day, in 
what men would have called moderation, but hardly 
"according to Christ" in Paul's phrase ; but that was 
not to be expected. That he was not better than 
his neighbours he readily admitted; but he thought 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 177 

he was not much worse ; and he jogged on through 
life, liking it and getting on very well, never aiming 
very high and remaining on the whole a little com- 
monplace perhaps; but so do many people. Like 
everybody else he made a joke now and then, not 
very clever jokes perhaps; but nobody admits being 
destitute of a sense of humour; everybody has it; 
and like other people he would repeat his jokes. 

After a while he came to know some Christian 
people, or some of his friends turned Christian, and 
this enlarged his range of humour, much to his satis- 
faction. He got several new jokes out of it, fairly 
obvious ones, but none the worse for that. It is not 
every pleasantry that will keep for seventeen hun- 
dred years, so perhaps they were not then so tedious 
as they may have become. He chaffed his friends 
on their change of belief and conduct, dealing first, 
as was natural, with the superficial. He made game 
of them and they took it good-temperedly. Some- 
times they argued sensibly with him, and he grew 
flippant ; sometimes they returned his fire with quips 
original or borrowed. 

They kept none of the usual festivals, he noticed, 
they never put lighted lamps at their doors, 1 never 
wore garlands ; and he told them, "It's a poor heart 
that never rejoices. Why do you never enjoy life, 
never even wear a garland? It is bad for trade, 

^ertullian, "Apology," 35; "Idolatry," 15; cf. "de corona 
militis," 7, 10. 



178 THE PILGRIM 

too." The retort came : "No, I don't buy garlands 
for my head, but what difference does it make to the 
gardeners how I use flowers ? I like them best when 
they are free and unbound and trailing everywhere^ 
Even if they are done up in garlands, I smell with 
my nose, not with my hair; 1 I can't see them if I 
am crowned with them, and I am told that damp 
flowers round the head are bad for the brain." 2 
"What about incense?" "No, we don't buy in- 
cense." "There you are!" "The money for that 
all goes to Arabia and abroad." "Oh!" "But do 
be sensible ! How can we be bad for trade, when we 
live in the same way as everybody else; we aren't 
Brahmins or Indian sages who lived naked in the 
woods and fly from mankind. We go to the baths 
and the butchers as you do; we have to get every- 
thing in the market just as we used, and go to the 
same shops and inns and fairs. 3 Of course there are 
some trades we don't patronize, as you know very 
well — the soothsayers and astrologers don't get our 
money; nor the magicians and poisoners, nor the 
bullies and other dirty fellows." 4 Then the con- 
versation stopped. 

Next time they met, the sculptor took a more 
serious line. "If you aren't careful, you may have 
to stand before the judgment-seat of the pro-consul 

1 Tertullian, "Apology," 42. 

2 Clement Alex., "Psedagogus," ii 70. 

3 Tertullian, "Apology," 42. 
* Tertullian, "Apology," 43. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 179 

one of these days." "And one of these days/' 
rejoined his friend, more gravely still, "you will 
have to stand before the judgment-seat of Christ." 
Again, they encountered in a quiet street, and his 
greeting, not loud enough for passers-by to hear, 
if there were any, was the common anti-Christian 
cry: "Away with the atheists!" "Whom do you 
mean?" "You, of course; you don't worship the 
gods." "But are you sure they are gods?" "Well, 
we reckon them gods ; they are gods for us." 1 "For 
you ? Then who is it robs their temples ? — it is not 
we ! Gods for you ! and look how you go and see 
them burlesqued on the stage — you told us about it 
not so long ago. 2 And look at the rubbish you offer 
them in sacrifice! Why, the other day a lot of your; 
gods were being sold by auction! Look in your 
shop and see what the spiders think of your gods!" 3 
"Never mind the spiders! It is our piety to the 
gods that made the Roman Empire what it is; the 
gods built it up for us !" "What? Jupiter who was 
buried in Crete, do you mean ? 4 — a foreign god, and 
dead and buried at that? Or — try a really Roman 
god ! do you mean Sterculus [the dung-god] ?" 5 
The Christian paused, and then began again : "How 
many emperors do you recognize?" "One, of 

1 Tertullian, "Apology," 13. 

2 Tertullian, "Apology," 15. 
8 Tertullian, "Apology," 14; 13; 12. 
4 Tertullian, "Apology," 25. 

6 Tertullian, "Apology," 25. 



180 THE PILGRIM 

course." "Not more?" "Good God, no! I don't 
want a trial for treason!" "Stop a minute! what 
do you mean when you say 'Good God!' like that?" 
"Oh! it's just an expression." "An expression of 
what?" "I don't know What are you getting 
at?" "Don't you see? When you speak naturally 
you only recognize one God! 'Good God y you say, 
and 'God sees,' and 'I leave it to God.' You really 
know — your soul knows — that there is only one God ; 
your soul is Christian, if you're not !" 1 "I never 
thought of that." "No, of course you didn't; you 
haven't thought much about it at all." "Well, per- 
haps I haven't; I'm just an ordinary man. But, 
I say, what made you ask if I recognized more 
emperors than one?" "Oh! just this. If you did, it 
wouldn't mean there were more emperors than one ; 
but the one emperor would let you know how many 
emperors there are, if he got to hear of it." "By 
Jove ! he would." "And supposing there's only one 
God, what will He say to you, if you tell him what 
you told me, 'We reckon the others gods ; they are 
gods for us'?" The sculptor held his tongue; then 
he laughed and said : "It might be pretty awkward. 
Well ! good-bye." He went off to his shop, and the 
first thing he noticed was a new spider-web hanging 
between Jupiter and Mercury. "Well!" he ejacu- 
lated, "if that isn't what he said just now? It's 
odd!" And perhaps he thought a little, 
^ertullian, "Apology," 17. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 181 

A festival came round; and returning from it, 
merry and crowned, he met one of his dismal Chris- 
tian friends and rallied him: "All gloom and no 
garlands again !" "You don't seem to realize that 
my crown may be coming in the next world. 1 Be- 
sides, you don't see what you are doing; you are 
always bothering us to wear crowns of flowers, but 
what you gave our Master was a crown of thorns/' 2 
"A crown of thorns? I never heard of that!" 
"No!" said the Christian, "there are quite a lot of 
things you never heard of. You prefer not to know 
what we say. You are inquisitive about everything 
else in the world ; you are always wanting to know ; 
but when it comes to Christianity, you aren't in- 
quisitive, you don't want to know ! 3 It's much 
easier to make fun of things you don't understand 
and don't know. Why don't you come to one of 
our meetings and know what we really mean and 
what we believe? Afraid of the police and the 
spies?" That the sculptor repudiated; he was not 
afraid of anything. "Not afraid of hearing what 
we say?" "No!" "Then come and hear it." 

At last they prevailed on him to come on a 
Sunday. 4 They brought him by a roundabout way 
and back streets into an upper room. He had been 

1 Tertullian, "De Corona Militis," 15. 

2 Ibid., 14; Clement Alex., "Psedagogus," ii. 73. 

3 Tertullian, "ad Nationes," i. 1. 

4 Sunday: Justin Martyr, "Apology," 67, from which this 
description of the meeting is taken. 



182 THE PILGRIM 

in temples often, at festivals, on ordinary occasions, 
sometimes too delivering gods that had been ordered 
or doing repairs. But he had never seen any temple 
like this ; there was no god, no altar, and no very 
obvious priest ; and, the strangest thing of all, there 
was no ritual worth talking about, and everything 
was intelligible, at least so far as words went. Pas- 
sages were read at some length from the commen- 
taries or Memoirs of the Apostles, as they called 
them to him, though sometimes they called them 
Gospels ; and from the writings of the Jewish proph- 
ets. He was not scholar enough to realize how bad, 
how illiterate the Latin was ; * but he found the 
prophets not very lucid; the Gospels were clearer 
for ordinary people. When the reading was done, 
someone rose and in a speech urged all present 
to follow the great example set to them in these 
books. Then all stood and prayer was made to 
Christ, just as prayer was made in the temples of the 
gods, 2 and they sang. They ended their prayers 
with a foreign word which he did not know, Amen; 
one or two substituted Alleluia, 2, Money was col- 
lected, for the poor and sick apparently. Altogether 
it was an odd ritual, and a little dull ; it lacked pomp 
and spectacle, and made a heavier demand on at- 
tention and intelligence than ordinary temple cere- 

1 Cf. Arnobius, i. 58, 59 ; and Augustine, "Confessions." 
a Pliny's letter to Trajan on Christian worship, "Epp." x. 
96,7. 
3 Tertullian, "de Oratione," 27. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 183 

monies. Still he had been interested in the Memoirs, 
and was struck with the earnestness of the speakers 
and with the atmosphere of friendship. 

After some weeks he went again, and by and by 
became a not infrequent attender. He grew more 
interested in the books and in the extraordinary cor- 
respondence between the Gospels and the Prophets. 
Could the story really have been all foretold ? Were 
the prophecies genuine? On that, they told him, 
he could ask the Jews. Some of the things preached 
were quite silly — "all that about dead men rising" ; 
he said, "of course dead men don't rise; you know 
that as well as I." When they persisted; "Well!" 
he said, "you don't make it true by talking about 
it. If talk made things true, we should have to be- 
lieve all that the religious imposters tell us, and the 
miracle-mongers in the market-place. 1 It doesn't 
happen." "How do you know it didn't happen?" 
"A question like that isn't necessary." By and by he 
heard more about the judgment-seat of Christ, and 
realized what they had meant by it. It was not a 
pleasant theme; it was uncomfortable — all that talk 
about the Judge's left hand; still the Christians be- 
lieved it, and either that or something else affected 
their lives. For it was quite clear they were decent 
honest people, intensely kind and eager to help the 

1 See Lucian's "Lover of Lies," full of such people and their 
tales; and Celsus, quoted by Origen, "contra Celsum," i. 68, 
miracles for coppers ; and Marcus Aurelius, i. 6. 



184 THE PILGRIM 

wretched ; 1 and one man, whom he saw among them, 
he recognized as formerly a professional thief, 
though he was learning a trade now. There were 
slaves too, on whom nobody looked down, which 
surprised him a good deal at first, but he came 
to know them, and found they were not like ordinary 
slaves — not so bitter or so small-minded, but happy 
and honest, and not unmanly. 

Still, when he really pulled himself together, he 
saw that the whole fabric of their talk was rotten. 
God's love was not a very sound idea ; it was senti- 
mental; and one day he came across a parody of 
the Incarnation story, which amused him very much, 
and which he fired off at his friends. He had heard 
how somebody, who had written a book, 2 had com- 
pared Christians to frogs sitting round their pond, 
and croaking out to one another a story of God be- 
coming one of them because He loved them; — 
"really, when you think of it, from the gods' point 
of view, away up beyond the air, there can't be 
much difference between frogs and men." Yes, the 
frogs croaked away and told how God meant to save 
the frogs who believed — and even the tadpoles — 
when He came and burnt up the rest of the world 
with fire, like a clumsy cook. It was really a very 
good take-off of what the Christians told him. 

1 1 Clement Rom. ii. 2. 

2 The comparison comes from Celsus' "True Word," written 
in 176 a.d. against the Christians. Cf. Origen, "contra 
Celsum," iii. 71. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 185 

So he did not seem very likely to become a con- 
vert, though he was not unfriendly. "He remains 
interested/' one Christian would say to another, "but 
only fitfully; and he does not show any signs of 
joining us — unless that he argues where he used to 
laugh. He was wanting to know whether we would 
take him if he accepted Jesus and kept the rest of 
the gods ; and now this silly parody about the frogs 
comes up, whenever we talk with him." 

By and by a great day came. There were going 
to be beasts shows, gladiator shows, in the amphi- 
theatre. The fascination of them we learn from the 
tale of the student in St. Augustine's Confessions. 
The sculptor liked them — at least, he had always 
liked them and he resolved to go. His Christian 
friends, of course, would not go; but he was not a 
Christian, and he went and got a good seat from 
which he could see everything. The great place 
quickly filled up with crowds of people in high ex- 
pectation. He had not been there very long before 
he realized there was some special excitement ; there 
was trouble on foot, he soon saw ; Christian trouble. 
The cry rose and was taken up all round: "Away 
with the atheists!" and then: "The Christians to 
the lions !" The whole place was seething with ex- 
citement and confused shouting, that concentrated 
again and again in these cries. 

All sorts of things surged through the sculptor's 
mind. He would like to get out, but that was im- 



186 THE PILGRIM 

possible now, and it might lead to suspicions. "Who 
could have denounced them? Was there a spy 
there last Sunday night ? That Jew ? 1 I wonder 
if he saw me!" The man's heart sank; and then 
he thought of his friends: "I wonder whom they 
have got ! O God I" And he lapsed into that nat- 
ural monotheism of the soul of which they had 
spoken to him. The shouting grew in volume ; hard 
faces fired with fury and rage. 2 The man next 
him looked at him: "What's the matter?" The 
sculptor concealed his alarm, and lied hurriedly: 
"I don't feel well." "That's a pity," said the man, 
and fell to shouting Christianos ad leones 3 and for- 
got him. 

His seat commanded the entrance to the arena, 
and he saw the gate thrown open. Everybody 
looked at once, leaping on the seats and all shouting 
more than ever. He must see, so he, too, mounted 
his seat, in time to see one — two — three — four men 
dragged in — then two women — another man, all of 
them stripped to the skin. They were led to the 
centre of the arena and tied to stakes there. The 
women had both recently had babies, one of them 
in prison; and for some curious reason the mob in- 
sisted on their being clothed; something was flung 
over them, and then the show began in earnest. The 

1 Tertullian, "Apol.," 7; "Scorpiace," 10. 
a Tertullian, "de Spectaculis," 15, 16. 

8 On this cry and its variations, cf. Tertullian, "Apology," 
40; "de Resurrectione Carnis," 22; "de Spect.," 27. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 18T 

sculptor knew them both ; one of them he had heard 
tell her visions at the Christian meeting, a gentle 
lady — and it came to this ! One of the men seemed 
to be looking in his direction; did they recognize 
him ? Could they think he had sold them ? — horrible 
thought! He could not tell them he was loyal — 
could not help them — could not get away — could not 
take his eyes off them . A savage cow was let loose 
on them and tossed both women; and every cruel 
passion in human nature released itself in delight 
and yelling. Then shouts for a lion. From the en- 
trance he saw a leopard come out, prodded from 
behind, startled by the howling crowd. Catlike, when 
it saw the naked victims in front, it lay flat on the 
ground and crept nearer. The silence grew tense, 
everybody watched and held his breath. 1 Suddenly 
the beast made a big spring, it leapt on the back of 
Saturus and ripped it open. The man was drenched 
with his own blood. Some witty spectator called 
out: "Washed and saved," and in a moment the 
thousands were shouting it at the bleeding man 
— Solvum lotum! salvum lotum! The whole story is 
in Tertullian's Acts of the Martyrdom of Felicitas 
and Perpetua. The sculptor saw it all ; at last it was 
over, and he got out of the amphitheatre, resolved 
never to enter it again. He reached home somehow, 
tingling and disturbed. He sat down in front of 
one of his idols; he could not work, he could not 
1 On this interval of tension, cf. Tertullian, "de Pudicitia," 22. 



188 THE PILGRIM 

think; he broke down and wept. The week passed 
in a storm of misery and unrest. 

On the Sunday night he sought out what was left 
of the Christian meeting. It was smaller than be- 
fore, smaller by more gaps than the martyrs would 
have filled. One or two looked at him doubtfully, 
and at last the presiding member asked him why 
he had come. He said: "I want to be baptized." 
"But why?" "Because nobody could die like that 
unless he knew he was right." They soon were clear 
that he had come over to them in earnest, that 
the blood of the martyrs was indeed the seed of the 
church ; 1 but they deferred his baptism till he should 
learn more of the faith he was to profess. He be- 
came a catechumen. 

At last, after weeks of waiting and learning, his 
catechumenate was ended, and on Easter day, clad 
in white, he received his baptism; and, as with all 
who receive it in adult life, it meant a great deal to 
him. He formally renounced the devil, his pomp 
and his angels, and professed publicly his faith, 
using a formula already taught him; he was then 
immersed three times in the name of the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As he came from the 
baptistery (lavacrum), they gave him a mixture of 
milk and honey ; they anointed him, and laid their 
hands on his head, inviting the Holy Spirit in bene- 
1 Tertullian, "Apology," 50; "Ad Scapulam," 5. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 189 

diction. 1 Afterwards he was admitted to the Com- 
munion of the Lord's Supper. He went home with a 
joy he had never known before; he belonged to 
Christ; his sins were forgiven, a new life lay before 
him and immortality beyond it. He was wonderfully 
happy, 2 and sang Christian hymns as he carved his 
statues. He was a new man. 

Here, perhaps, the pen should be laid down; for 
what follows, I am told, is anti-climax. But so is 
most of life. The novelist, for intsance, reaches his 
climax in his last pages and leaves his readers to 
infer the rest; all that follows the union of lovers 
must be dull, progressively dull. Life would be dif- 
ferent if managed on that plan, certainly shorter; 
and happily all Christians were not martyred imme- 
diately after their baptism. Our sculptor lived on, 
and, if our reconstruction of his story is right, it was 
in the years of anti-climax and routine that he did 
his work. Felicitas and Perpetua gave their great 
testimony in the arena ; he gave his in his shop. He 
might have repeated theirs ; perhaps he did ; perhaps 
he did re-enter the amphitheatre once more; but 
his chief work was in the shop, and it came about 
somehow so. 

A stranger came to the Christian meeting — a man 
you would know again if you saw him once, a crea- 

^ertullian, "de Baptismo," 7, 8; "de Corona Militis," 2; 
see H. M. Gwatkin, "Church History," vol. i. p. 251. 
a Clement Alex., "Paedagogus," i. 22. 



190 THE PILGRIM 

ture of imagination, all on fire, a master of telling 
words, with flashing eyes, keen face, and sensitive 
lips. 1 He preached on Idolatry — on the real mean- 
ing of its renunciation in baptism; how insidious it 
is — not only an affair of definitely worshipping 
idols, but of doing anything which brings honour to 
the evil spirits represented by idols, or makes their 
worship effective or attractive, or recognizes them 
in any way whatever. "No art, no profession, no 
trade, which plays a part in the equipment or the 
formation of idols can lack the accusation of idola- 
try." 2 "You," cried the speaker, flashing out an in- 
dignant finger, "are a teacher ; it is your business 
to train boys in literature; yes, to drill them in the 
names and pedigrees and legends of false gods; you 
keep their festivals as holidays, you dedicate the 
boy's first school fee to Minerva; on the birthday 
of every idol you decorate the school with flowers — 
you who renounced the devil, his pomp and his 
angels." 3 "And you," he wheeled round and the 
accusing finger pointed to another, "you are a 
painter, you press the gold leaf, you gild the temple 
of Satan; the plasterer, the carpenter, the mason, 
all lend their trades to the shrine." 4 "You," and 
the finger seemed to the sculptor to point directly 

lr The reader may have wondered why the sculptor never 
met Tertullian before, if they both knew Perpetua. ^ Some of 
the scraps rearranged on the page may want a little more 
sorting. 

a Tertullian, "Idolatry," II. 

3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid., 1 1. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 191 

at himself, as the bow drawn at a venture drove 
the arrow home — "you are a sculptor! So from 
your idols you come to the church, from the shop 
of the enemy to the house of God, you lift up to God 
the Father hands that are mothers of idols, touch 
the body of the Lord with those hands, that out- 
side give bodies to devils. Yes, and those hands 
give to others what they have defiled! The Jews 
once laid hostile hands on Christ, and yours every 
day do it to his body. Look well to it, whether he 
meant this too, when he said, 'If thy hand offend 
thee, cut it offi!'" 1 

This was bad enough with the painful thoughts it 
waked of inconsistency, of apostasy and ingratitude.. 
But the speaker was not done ; he went on and tore 
to shreds every plea of defence. "I have no other 
way to live!" "You should have thought of that 
before; you have renounced the devil and his angels., 
The builder should count the cost, lest, after he has 
begun, he blush to find all spent." "I shall be in 
need !" "But the Lord calls the needy happy." "I 
shall have no food." "He said, Think not of food/ 
and as for clothing he pointed to the lilies." "But 
provision must be made for my children and pos- 
terity." "No man putting his hand to the plough 
and looking back is fit for work." "But I have a 
contract." "No man can serve two masters." "I 
have no means to live!" "Faith fears no famine t 
1 Tertullian, "Idolatry," 7. 



192 THE PILGRIM 

What is hard with man is easy with God." * "But 
I sha'n't be able to live." "Must you live? I don't 
see the necessity. There are no musts where God is 
concerned." "Everybody does it; it is custom!" 
"Our Lord Jesus Christ called himself not custom 
but Truth." 2 And back he swung once more to 
the baptismal promise to renounce the devil, his 
pomps and his angels. "Can you really have re- 
nounced with the tongue, what you confess with the 
hand?" 3 

It is not easy for people who live in a land long 
Christian to realize how intricately religion is woven 
into life, but in every heathen land to-day questions 
of conscience arise at every turn for the Christian 
convert. If Chinese law requires, as it does, some 
act of veneration from every schoolboy to the picture 
of Confucius hung in the schoolroom, is that a token 
of mere respect or does it imply worship? Is Con- 
fucius a man or a god ? Which does the law mean, 
and which do you mean? In India, I came to the 
conclusion that I had myself been guilty of what 
Tertullian, and others not so strict, would call idola- 
try — more than once. It is a common courtesy 
to give a visitor a garland; visiting temples with a 
government official in a native state, I accepted gar- 
lands, which were taken off the idol. I meant to 
be courteous, merely; I am no worshipper of the 

1 Tertullian, "Idolatry," 12. 

a Tertullian, "De Virginibus Velandis," 1. 

8 "DeIdololatria," 6. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 193 

Nandi; but it was arguable that I recognized the 
Nandi by accepting his garland. Probably, though 
not certainly, in the case of a European the act 
would not be strictly construed as recognition; but 
for a new convert "with conscience of the idol," it 
might be very different. Again, I once attended a 
performance of Sakuntalam, Kalidasa's famous play, 
in a missionary college, and, in my ignorance of 
Sanskrit, let my attention wander till I noticed a 
picture of the goddess Sarasvati set on a chair on the 
stage, and in front of it a plate with bananas and 
broken cocoanut. Later on, I realized more fully 
what it meant. It had a close analogy with the 
stips which Tertullian denounces as given to Mi- 
nerva. Una colit esse Minervam, says the Latin poet ; 
what does colit mean? A Chinese reckoned some 
170 trades as tinged with idolatry. 

The sculptor went home in trouble. It was just. 
He had been untrue to his baptismal vow; he had 
been making his living off the devil and his angels, 
by carving their images. His tongue had sung 
hymns to Christ, while his hand worshipped the 
devil by making him. With a sigh — it was the hidden 
artist in the artisan that sighed — he turned his 
statues face to the wall ; he was done with them for 
ever; and certain of his tools he laid aside. Ter- 
tullian had dropped a hint, a practical hint; and he 
took it. "The plasterer can mend roofs as well as 
daub temples; the painter, the marble-mason, the 



194 THE PILGRIM 

bronze-worker have other things they can do. How 
much sooner can he who carves a Mars out of a 
lime tree fasten together a chest! No art but is 
either mother or kin of another art. If the wages 
are smaller, they come oftener. To gild shoes and 
slippers is daily work; not so to gild Mercury and 
Serapis. Luxury and ostentation have more votaries 
than superstition/ ' x We need not discuss the law- 
fulness of ministry to luxury ; our poor hero was not 
gilder or shoemaker ; but he could carve stones ; and 
if it is luxury to have designs, friezes, ornaments 
about one's house, it is not so ostentatious as to 
wear gilded slippers. At any rate it was a loop- 
hole. Tertullian had not recognized how dull the 
change might be from sculptor to marble-mason; 
but if Christ preferred it, that was enough. So to 
the building trade he turned, and squared stones 
for them — square stones, flat stones, flat stones and 
square stones — an eternal monotony of right angles 
and straight lines — never the shoulders of Venus 
or the head of Apollo rising from the block with 
their splendid curves. Even a fifth-rate artist 
loves his art ; and the sculptor gave it up. No more 
curves — at best, poor pomegranates in a row, or a 
long stiff garland of flowers; never the free glad 
touch of his art again. What a life! but it was 
better. 

At last the thought came to him : Why not a 
1 "De Idololatria," 8. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 195 

statue of Christ Himself ? It had never been done ; 
there was no model, and he was of no use without 
a pattern; originality had never been his trade. 
Christians had used little devices in the flat. 1 The 
oldest and commonest was the anchor, an emblem 
of salvation, and not to be drawn without a cross. 
The cross itself they did not carve; it was still a 
symbol of shame and it attracted attention and 
derision, sometimes mutilation. The crucifix came 
late into Church use, not till after the victory of 
the Church; it was early used in parody by enemy 
and blasphemer. A cross made of four gammas 
was used, and so was the monogram of the initials 
of Jesus Christ X f a device also used by pagans 
with another meaning (ckrysos, gold). The fish 
too is a very ancient symbol of Christ, because the 
Greek letters of it made an acrostic (IX9TS) — Jesus 
Christ, God's Son, Saviour; just as Verdi became 
popular in the days of Italy's struggle for union, 
and had his name written up everywhere, because 
it had an acrostic value — Vittorio Emmanuele Re 
D'ltalia. The fish and the composer's name were 
quite innocent things to carve and write up; they 
only spoke to those who understood. So well estab- 
lished was the fish, that Tertullian, in speaking of 
baptism, says: "We little fishes also, like ourlXGTS 
Jesus Christ, are born in the water, and are only 

a C/. Marticchi, "Christian Epigraphy" (Eng. tr.), p. 59. 



196 THE PILGRIM 

saved by remaining in the water." * Thus two little 
fishes are drawn moving toward an anchor or hung 
to an anchor. A ship, a dove, a light-house tower 
were also used. The sculptor, however, meant some- 
thing with more suggestion of art, a genuine work 
of art, not a mere device ; but he had no model. 

But one day in church a passage from Luke was 
read : "And when he hath found it, he layeth it on 
his shoulders rejoicing." A thought, not from the 
speaker, flashed into the sculptor's mind. Whether 
he heard the rest of the sermon, I do not know; 
but he too went home rejoicing, and began at once 
to turn over his old patterns till he found what he 
wanted. He pulled the sheet out; it was of course 
not Christ; but Hermes (Mercury) the Ram-Bearer, 
a heathen god carrying a sheep on his shoulder. 
And how good the tools felt ! He was quit of flags 
and pomegranates for a while. He worked hard, 
and found himself perhaps a little out of practice, 
but gradually the figure began to emerge from the 
block — the drapery and the rough outline first ; then 
t the limbs, the sheep, the head. The face was 
going to be the difficulty; it could not be exactly 
like Hermes the Ram-Bearer ; he must alter it some- 
how, but he kept it young and beardless. A Chris- 
tian friend dropped in, and asked in dismay : "Idols 
again? are you going back?" "No!" said the sculp- 
tor; "I'm not going back. You wait and see." 
1 Tertullian, "de Baptismo," i. 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 197 

At last it was done. The Good Shepherd bore a 
strong likeness to Hermes with the Ram ; it was not 
a very great work of art — it was stiff and conven- 
tional, not much better and not much worse than 
the gods he made of old ; but it told a tale. It was 
not Hermes ; it was Christ ; and in his rough statue 
he had embodied three things. The Good Shepherd 
stood there with the sheep found and on his should- 
ers; and as the sculptor looked at his poor, homely- 
masterpiece, he could almost fancy the joy in the 
presence of the angels, he enjoyed it so much him- 
self. He had worked into his statue the gist of the 
Christian gospel; he could not preach it, perhaps 
he could not talk about it very clearly or convinc- 
ingly, but stone and chisel were his medium of ex- 
pression, and he had made it clear in stone that God 
had sent the Good Shepherd, and that he is always 
seeking the lost and finding it. There is an eternal 
element in an artist's conception, and if his hand and 
brain did not go paired, his heart had seized the 
eternal significance of Christ, and his hand had done 
it into stone; somebody else, with more skill, could 
improve on it. In the third place — here he had to 
meet critics who knew the scripture better than he 
did, and who told him he had confused the Good 
Shepherd in St. John with the everyday ordinary 
shepherd in St. Luke; the Good Shepherd in St. 
John never carried a sheep. "Didn't he?" said the 
sculptor ; "perhaps I have mixed them, then ; but my 



198 THE PILGRIM 

idea of the Good Shepherd was the one who went 
after the lost sheep till he found it;" and then he 
added with a sudden flash of modesty and truth: 
"I wanted to tell my own story too ; when I carved 
the sheep on his shoulders, I thought of all he had 
done for me." 

And here our scrap-work story ends; and we 
may ask again how much of it is true. It has at 
any rate so much truth in it, that it was in this way, 
one by one, the early Christians were won for Jesus 
Christ, by faithful, dim, obscure people, whose names 
did not survive, and sometimes (as I think in Tertul- 
lian's own case) by the death of the martyrs. The 
statue of the Good Shepherd is historical, though I 
do not know exactly the date x or place of its mak- 
ing, and no one knows the name of the maker. But 
consider what he had done. If he had mixed the 
parables of Jesus, if he had made Christ look sur- 
prisingly like a Greek God — one of the devil's angels, 
if he had had a most pagan zest in handling the old 
tools till he wondered if his motives were as pure 
as he hoped — he gave to Art a great type for all 
that, for he had worked from his heart and wrought 
a Christian's experience of his Saviour into stone; 
and every such translation of it is a new Gospel. 

1 There is a statue of the Good Shepherd in the Vatican, 
which is assigned to the early second century — an earlier date 
than I have ventured upon. A Terra-cotta of the Shepherd, 
of the end of the third century, was found in a Christian 
cemetery at Akhmim (Panopolis). 



STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD 199 

If he had, as we have imagined, renounced what he 
loved best in the world for Christ's sake, he had 
found it again — the lost curves, the lost art, the lost 
joy of creative work. In any case he gave the Chris- 
tian Church a new medium, a new voice, and a new 
and eternal expression of the central truth of the 
Gospel. The type he made has never died and never 
will. The man had caught the very thought of 
Jesus, and embodied it. The Good Shepherd will 
always for Christian people have the sheep upon his 
shoulders. 



XI 

THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 1 



The term Saint to-day has some implication of 
anaemia and irrelevance. The word suggests 
men and women who lived in an old world — or, if 
they live still, have a sort of half -life in out-of-the- 
way corners of this world, screened from the knowl- 
edge of its mind and its ways ; they may have known 
something of human sin and misery, they may have 
lived beautiful lives amid squalid surroundings, but 
all the time they were elsewhere in heart — mystics 
who dreamed themselves away from our world into 
some vague Divine love — people for whom the in- 
tellect was never a source of trouble — happy strang- 
ers in a world of doubt and change, of economic and 
psychological perplexities — at peace because they es- 
caped all problems. People of another habit, who 
lived in the thick of the world's battles, who doubted 
half the time and believed furiously the rest, who 
fought for their visions and ideals, received blows, 

1 Perhaps I may properly recall that the second part of this 
paper was an article in The Student Movement, written on 
the suggestion of Dr Alexander Whyte. 

200 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 201 

and dealt as good or better in return — men of that 
type, of course, were not saints. St. Paul luckily is 
so far away in time, and his words so screened by 
the nimbus of inspiration, that we allow the label 
to him ; he remains a saint because he has ceased to 
be a man. But if he had lived at the Reformation ! 
"Grand, rough old Martin Luther," as Browning 
called him (with a hint of patronage in his combi- 
nation of adjectives), Luther, "whose words were 
half-battles," as Jean Paul Friedrich Richter said, 
and who had too Homeric a joy in battle altogether v 
— he does not correspond to our conception of a 
saint. 

Indeed, I have heard it suggested that it is better, 
generally, not to read the Lives of men whom we 
have been taught in childhood to reverence; and it 
was a Life of Luther that prompted the remark. 
The writer perhaps had aimed too successfully at 
being colourless; but the critic alleged that it was 
Luther's own letters that gave him away. To so low 
an ebb in historical criticism and intelligence have 
we come, that cultured people seem unable to under- 
stand anything but pretty manners and nice thoughts 
in religion. Many things have contributed to this. 
We live in an age of uncertainty, when anybody 
who is definite makes us uncomfortable; just as a 
child who is trying to be emphatic is told he is rude. 

*"Dear husband, you are too rude!" said Katie, when he 
denounced Schwenckfeld as a fool and a maniac in 1543. P. 
Smith, "Life of Luther/' p. 407. 



202 THE PILGRIM 

Any emphasis is rude. The idea of Christian char- 
ity has been perverted, in reaction against intoler- 
ance, to mean a Protagorean acceptance of the equal 
value of all opinions; but when St. Paul said that 
Charity believeth all things, he hardly meant this. 1 
A Catholic revival, too, has affected English journal- 
ists, who are apt to be our spiritual guides — quick, 
easy, impressionists, with a sympathetic eye for the 
picturesque and the unusual — and Luther is not very 
acceptable to them. Many of us have a defective 
idea of freedom of thought, and use the name for 
what is simply absence of thought, loose and incon- 
clusive thinking that grapples with nothing and leads 
nowhere. There is a lack of intellectual discipline 
in our training — of the realization that truth is not 
obvious or easy, that conviction is essential to real 
action and to manhood itself, and that it is only to 
be reached by a kind of dour, dogged, grim energy 
of mind. How people of such slack intellectual 
habits could expect to understand history, it is not 
easy to explain ; it would be more frank to say they 
have no knowledge of it at all. Religion, again, is 
no field for the easy-going. Bishop Gore has re- 
marked that men take the love of God as an obvious 
axiom in religious thought, while it is anything but 

1 So much was pointed out by Luther himself. " 'You Wit- 
tenbergers have no charity!' When we ask what chanty is, 
they say, 'That we should be harmonious in doctrine and 
abandon those quarrels over religion/ " Luther was quite 
explicit that charity does not include compromising the claims 
of Christ or of truth. — M'Giffert, "Life of Luther," p. 326. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 203 

obvious or axiomatic; it is a problem, or, if it is a 
conclusion, it takes a great deal of reaching, as hard 
to win as the kingdom of God, which, as Jesus said, 
may need some violence if a man is really to enter it. 

Luther is a historical figure, and a man who 
opened for us new paths in the experience of Jesus 
Christ. Lord Acton once wrote to Bishop Creigh- 
ton, and Creighton repeated the question in a letter 
to Thomas Hodgkin: "What was it that made 
Luther so great ?" They were all three great his- 
torians ; Hodgkin's answer is not recorded, but both 
the other two held that it had never been explained. 
How many people have never asked the question at 
all! But once a man begins to ask it, and to feel 
his way to the answer and to divine why Luther was 
great, he has a prospect at once of a more intellig- 
ible view of History, and of a deeper conception of 
Christianity. For some part of Luther's greatness 
surely lies in his effectual grasp of the significance 
of Christ, in his new view of Christ's incredible love 
and power. When we begin to have glimpses of a 
Christ on the scale of Luther's Christ, the world, as 
Paul said, is a new thing, a new creation — amazing- 
ly, startlingly new and wonderful. 

Other types of religious life have of late been 
brought before us with singular skill and charm. 
Few books can, in these respects, rival M. Paul Saba- 
tier's "St. Francis," for instance, and a number of 
brilliant and able writers have been interpreting Mys- 



204 THE PILGRIM 

ticism to us. Few to-day would echo, unqualified or 
at all, the trenchant words of John Wesley about 
Jacob Boehme, or Behmen, as he was then called in 
England: "I object, not only that he is obscure 
(although even this is an inexcusable fault in a 
writer on practical religion) ; not only that his whole 
hypothesis is unproved; wholly unsupported either 
by Scripture or reason ; but that the ingenious mad- 
man over and over contradicts Christian experience, 
reason, scripture and himself/' * It does not help 
Luther with us to be told of his rough speech, of 
the anger and fury, with which he hewed Casper 
Schwenckf eld, the mystic, in pieces before the Lord ; 
for, bluntly, we do not quickly see what the quar- 
rel was about; nor, perhaps, did Schwenckf eld. 
J3ut Luther accused Schwenckfeld of having two 
Christs 2 ; and in the long run the charge does lie 
against the mystics that their teaching turns atten- 
tion away from the historical Christ to an experi- 
ence, which, though they elect to associate it with a 
peculiar realization of God's love, is susceptible of a 
quite different interpretation. The mystics are in- 
deed the most dogmatic, and perhaps the least scien- 
tific, of men; but the time has not come to be dog- 
matic on the bases and the explanation of Mystic- 
ism. A seventeenth century writer, of little distinc- 
tion indeed, but an ex-Quaker, laid his finger on an 

^ohn Wesley's "Journal," 15th July, 1773 (vol. iii. p. 512; 
Everyman Edition). 
2 See below, p. 215. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 205 

essential weakness. 1 "It was not the light within 
that was hanged on a tree," he said, but "we came to 
forget and not regard, nor have faith in, the Cruci- 
fied Jesus." 

"Mysticism," says Rufus Jones, Quaker and 
scholar, "as a type of religion, has staked its precious 
realities too exclusively upon the functions of what 
to-day we call the subconscious. Impressed with the 
Divine significance of 'inward bubblings,' the mystic 
has made too slight an account of the testimony of 
Reason and the contribution of history." 2 That 
was very much what Luther meant, but belonging 
to the sixteenth century, and having a genius for 
incisive speech (and an incurable illness, too, it 
should be remembered), his language lacked some- 
thing of our modern scientific poise, and of the re- 
pose that marks our caste. 

It is good to be often reminded of St. Francis, 
who loved men — -which we may or may not under- 
stand — but who also loved Jesus in a way not so in- 
stinctive with us. Yet Francis belongs to the middle 
ages— a period more remote from us than the Athens 
of Pericles or the Roman Empire of Augustus ; and 
we belong to an age the legitimate heir of the 
troublesome times of Renaissance and Reformation. 
It is good to turn again to that Theologia Germanica, 

1 Francis Bugg, "The Picture of Quakerism" (1697), p. 23. 

2 Rufus Jones, "Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and 
Seventeenth Centuries," p. xxviii; a valuable and illuminating 
book. 



206 THE PILGRIM 

which Luther loved and ranked next to the Bible 
and St. Augustine. But it is good, also, to turn aside 
and drop in to chat with Luther at his table, to hear 
him preach, to watch him write — to ride with John 
Wesley and hear what he has to say to Kingswood 
colliers — and with them to be brought back to the 
old words and the old faith : Et in unum Dominum 
JESUM CHRISTUM . . . qui propter nos hom- 
ines et salutem nostram descendit de coelis et incar- 
natus est . . . et crucifixus est pro nobis. 1 



ii 

In what follows I propose, not, indeed, to answer 
Acton's question, but to speak of Luther's religion, 
as it finds expression in his table talk and in passages 
of his writings that have stayed with me, and which 
I have been glad to remember ; to try to give some 
picture of what he felt and believed, of what was the 
real stimulus to his controversies, but, much more, 
was the life-nerve of all he did and was. To set 
him among the men of his day, their methods, 
thoughts, doubts and discoveries, their wars and 
politics, and to see how he handles the life of man 
on the basis of his own experience of what Jesus 
Christ could be for a man — these are larger tasks, 
fit work for the specialist, who is at once historian 
1 Hahn, "Bibliothek der Symbole," No. 76. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 207 

and theologian, and loves Christ as Luther did. Our - 
present endeavour should be more compassable. 1 

The song in Faust suggests that Luther was fat 
and gross — a fate which sometimes overtakes us in 
later life, and it appears that Luther grew stout in 
old age. But Lucas Cranach, who painted him sev- 
eral times in middle life, drew a lean man of as- 
cetic appearance. He is thus described about 1 522 : 
"With deep brown-black eyes, flashing and sparkling 
like a star, so that you could not easily bear their 
gaze ... by nature a friendly and accessible man 
. . . his earnestness was so mingled with joy and 
kindliness that it was a pleasure to live with him." 2 
Nearly everyone who has described him was im- 
pressed by the restless fire that flashed from his 
eyes. 3 He scandalized Europe by marrying a nun, 
but he recaptured family life for religion by doing 
it. 

A great, strong, hearty, nonsensical, 4 shrewd, 

1 In what follows, references to M'Giffert and Preserved 
Smith are to their "Lives of Luther" ; Lindsay, "Reformation/' 
explains itself ; "Erlangen" means the great German edition 
of Luther's works; "Table Talk" is Luther's Table Talk 
(Tischreden), translated by Henry Bell, three centuries ago 
(Henry Bell, translated from the German edition of 1574, 
Frankfurt ; his actual copy is in the Library of Sidney Sussex 
College, Cambridge) ; "Galatians," the Commentary on that 
Epistle; Herrmann is Herrmann's "Communion of the Chris- 
tian with God," to which I owe many quotations (and a very 
great deal else) ; Currie, "Selection of Luther's Letters" (in 
English) ; Forstemann, edition of Luther's "Tischreden" 

(1844). 

2 M'Giffert, p. 240. 
8 P. Smith, p. 316. 

4 His fun, P. S. Smith, 345- 



208 THE PILGRIM 

charming, truculent character, he survives in the 
reminiscences of his friends and in his own letters. 
A well-known couplet preserves what he thought of 
the man who loves not woman, wine and song ; and 
in more serious mood he said, "Next to theology, it 
is to music I give the highest place and the greatest 
honour." * He loved books, and poetry, and Ger- 
man ballads, 2 and Cicero, 3 and chess, 4 and birds, and 
animals, and children, and common people, and beg- 
gars, and all sorts of things. He wrote jolly letters 
to his wife, "my Lord Katie," with religion and non- 
sense, and piety and fun mixed — letters exactly like 
himself, boyish to the last. Some of the most non- 
sensical and boyish of his letters were written to 
cheer her up, while he was away on that last journey, 
in the course of which he died ; "To the saintly anx- 
ious lady," he began, "most saintly doctoress." 5 He 
rallied his friends and joked about himself — what a 
talker he had been, and so on; he even talked non- 
sense about martyrdom, when his friends told him 
he was heading straight for it — "nettles wouldn't be 
so bad, one could stand them ; but to be burned with 
fire, — no, that would be too hot." 6 Incidentally, as 

1 d'Aubigne, iii. 241. Cf. P. Smith, 346. 

2 Ballads, P. Smith, 344, 345 ; letter to Wenzel Link, 2 Mch. 

1535. 

3 Of Cicero, "I hope God will be merciful to him." "Table 
Talk," p. 509. P. Smith, 342. 

4 M'Giffert, 299. 

5 Currie, No. 499. 
6 M'Giffert, p. 197. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 209 

we all know, he made new eras in religion and his- 
tory and criticism. Altogether he is what I have 
heard called "a great human" — one of the very- 
greatest, and it all centres in his religion. 

Luther was one of those real men who build on 
experience and not on theory. He flung himself as 
a monk into religious devotion, and did lasting in- 
jury to his health by his austerities. "The truth is," 
he said afterwards, "I was a pious monk, and I held 
my rule so strongly that I can say, 'If a monk ever 
reached heaven by monkery, I would have found my 
way there also' ; all my convent comrades will bear 
witness to that." * But his conscience never found 
peace in it all, nor elsewhere, till he realized the great 
fact which he summed up in the doctrine of Justifica- 
tion by Faith — the fact that it is God Who gives and 
not man who works out Salvation — that Salvation 
is just taking with a loving heart what God in His 
great love wants to give to you, and simply living in 
the assurance, conscious or subconscious all the time, 
that God in Christ has proved His love of you. 
That is the hard thing to believe, for, as he said, 
"We are always wanting to turn the tables and do 
good to that poor man, our Lord God, from whom 
we are rather to receive it." 2 It is the other way 
round — "before thou callest upon God or seekest 
Him, God must have come to thee and found thee." 

1 Lindsay, "Reformation" i. 427; Erlangen, 31, 273. 
* Herrmann, p. 213 ; Erlangen, 49, 343* 



210 THE PILGRIM 

And it is not mere intellectual assent to doctrines, 
but letting oneself go on God * — "There are many 
of you who say, 'Christ is a man of this kind: He 
is God's Son, was born of a pure virgin, became 
man, died, rose again from the dead,' and so forth ; 
that is all nothing. But when we truly say that He 
is Christ, we mean that He was given for us without 
any works of ours, that without any merits of ours 
He has won for us the Spirit of God, and has made 
us children of God; so that we might have a gra- 
cious God, might with Him be lords over all things 
in heaven and on earth, and, besides, might have 
eternal life through Christ — that is faith, and that is 
true knowledge of Christ" 2 When he was a monk, 
he says, 3 "When I prayed, or when I said mass, I 
used to add this in the end : 'O Lord Jesus, I come 
unto Thee, and I pray Thee that these burdens and 
this straightness of my rule and religion may be a 
full recompense for all my sins/ " But, as he says 
elsewhere, 4 "a believing soul ought to talk with our 
Saviour Christ in this manner: 'Lord! I am thy 
sins, Thou art my Righteousness; therefore am I 

1 Die aber Gott glauben die wagens auf Gott, und setzen 
alles dahin in Gottes Gewalt, dass er es mache nach seinem 
Gefallen. Erlangen, vol. 13, p. 252. Aber sich bloss an 
Christum hangen, durch den Glauben, als in dem wir, ohn alle 
unser Werk und Verdienst, Gottes Gnad und ewiges Leben 
haben, das ist nicht Menschen-sondern Gottes-Werk. Erlan- 
gen, 50, 241. 

2 Herrmann, p. 161. 

* "Galatians," f ol. 76 a. 

4 "Table Talk," p. 138; Forstemann, vol. i. p. 385, No. 115, 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 211 

joyful, and boldly do triumph; for my sins do not 
over-balance Thy Righteousness, neither will Thy 
Righteousness suffer me to be or remain a sinner. 
Blessed and praised be Thy holy Name (sweet 
Jesus) for evermore.' " Righteousness does not 
come from good works, but vice versa; "the tree 
maketh the apple, but not the apple the tree." * 

Everything turns on the Incarnation, but the In- 
carnation does not begin with a doctrine and an ab- 
stract noun — it begins with a baby. "Begin thou 
there where Christ began/' says Luther, 2 in other 
words inculcating what we have to learn, viz., that 
fact precedes theory, even if it be dogma, and that 
History comes before Theology — the history of 
Christ, the history of the Church, and the history of 
you and me. Thus, said Luther, 3 "Without Christ 
we cannot know God. . . . The Father Himself is 
too high ; therefore He saith, 'I will show you a way 
whereby you may come unto Me, namely, Christ; 
believe in Him, depend on Him, and then in due 
time ye shall well find who I am.' " Luther would 
not have men in any case dispute of predestination, 
and he used to quote a saying of Staupitz, "If thou 
wilt needs dispute concerning the same, then, I truly 
advise thee, to begin first at the wounds of Christ, 
as then all that disputation will cease and have an 

1 "Galatians," f ol. 84 a. 

2 "Galatians," f ol. 16 b. 

3 "Table Talk," p. 140; Forstemann, vol. i. p. 390, No. 120. 



212 THE PILGRIM 

end therewith." x "True Christian Divinity (as I 
give you often warning) setteth not God unto us in 
His majesty ... It commandeth us not to search 
out the nature of God, but to know His will set out 
to us in Christ/' "Wherefore whensoever thou art 
occupied in the matter of thy salvation, setting aside 
all curious speculation of God's unsearchable maj- 
esty, all cogitations of works, of traditions, of phil- 
osophy, yea, and of God's law too, run straight to 
the manger and embrace this Infant, and the Vir- 
gin's little babe in thine arms, and behold Him as He 
was born, sucking, growing up, conversant among 
men, teaching, dying, rising again, ascending up 
above all the heavens, and having power above all 
things. By this means shalt thou be able to shake 
off all terrors and errors, like as the sun driveth away 
the clouds. And this sight and contemplation will 
keep thee in the right way that thou mayest follow 
whither Christ is gone/' 2 Some of my readers may 
recall Spenser's Hymne of Heavenly Love: 

Beginne from first, where he encradled was 
In simple cratch, wrapt in a wad of hay, 
Betweene the toylefull Oxe and humble Asse, 
And in what rags, and in how base aray, 
The glory of our heauenly riches lay, 
When him the silly Shepheards came to see, 
Whom greatest Princes sought on lowest knee. 

From thence reade on the storie of his life, 
His humble carriage, his vnfaulty wayes, 

1 'Table Talk/' p. 405; Forstemann, iii. p. 160, No. 75. 
2 "Galatians," fol. 17 b. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 213 

His cancred foes, his fights, his toyle, his strife, 
His paines, his pouertie, his sharpe assayes, 
Through which he past his miserable dayes, 
Offending none, and doing good to all, 
Yet being malist both of great and small. 

And looke at last how of most wretched wights, 

He taken was, betrayd, and false accused, 

How with most scornefull taunts, and fell despights 

He was reuyld, disgrast, and foule abused, 

How scourgd, how crownd, how buffeted, how brused 

And lastly how twixt robbers crucifyde, 

With bitter wounds through hands, through feet and syde. 

I have sometimes wondered whether Spenser had 
seen the passage of Luther, for I have transcribed it 
from a copy of the second edition of the English 
translation of the Commentary on Gdatians, first 
published in 1575; and Spenser was of the Puritan 
party. "Try," writes Luther to Melanchthon (13 
Jan. 1522), "not to hear of Jesus in glory till thou 
have seen Him crucified." All this is no mere record 
of the past — "to me it is not simply an old song of 
an event that happened 1 500 years ago ... it is a 
gift and a bestowing that endures for ever." * 

The essence of the whole matter is that Christ 
belongs to and cares for the individual man. 
"Christ, when He cometh, is nothing else but joy 
and sweetness to a trembling and broken heart, as 
here Paul witnesseth, who setteth Him out in this 
most sweet and comfortable title, when he saith: 
'Which loved me and gave Himself for me.' Christ 

1 Herrmann, p. 186. 



214 THE PILGRIM 

therefore is in very deed a lover of those which are 
in trouble and anguish, and sin and death, and such 
a lover as gave Himself for us. . . . Read therefore 
with great vehemency these words me and for me." % 
It had been with him a temptation to think that God 
hated sinners and himself among them; so when 
such thoughts daunt him, he turns, and bids us turn, 
to Christ : — "Dost thou see nothing but the law, sin, 
terror, heaviness, temptation, death, hell and the 
devil? . . . Trouble me no more, O my soul . . . 
say 'Lady Law, thou art not alone, neither art thou 
all things, but besides three there are yet other things 
much greater and better than thou art, namely, grace, 
faith and blessing/ and all because of Christ. ,, 2 As 
he dwells on the thought of the Incarnation, he feels 
anew the wonder of it, the impossibility, as we do — 
"the greatest work of wonder which ever was done 
on earth is that the only begotten Son of God died 
the most contemned death upon the Cross. It is to 
us a wonder above all wonders that the Father should 
say to His only Son (who by nature is God), 'Go 
Thy way, let them hang Thee on the Gallows.' " 3 
It is this realization of a personal relation with 
God in Christ, in a crucified and risen Christ, that is 
the nerve of his controversies. The Pope, it was 
believed, could by a stroke of the pen, prevent a 

1 "Galatians," f ol. 88 b. 

3 "Galatians," f ol. 170 a. 

3 "Table Talk," p. 134. Forstemann, vol. i. *p. 376, No. 106. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 215 

whole nation from approaching God; an interdict 
meant spiritual death. 1 How could it be so, when 
one "read with great vehemency that me and for 
nie?" Luther stood for the priesthood of all believ- 
ers — "a Christian man is the most free lord of all 
and subject to none/' he wrote, and his next sentence 
developed his meaning: "A Christian man is the 
most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every- 
one." (That is the apple, and the former is the 
tree.) That is no doubt why he says, "When I am 
in the pulpit, then I resolve to preach only to men 
and maidservants ; I would not make a step into the 
pulpit for the sakes of Philip Melanchthon, Justus 
Jonas, or the whole University/' 2 "Thoughts are 
tax-free," he quoted, but when Schwenckfeld, the 
mystic, expounded his thoughts, Luther would have 
none of them — "he makes two Christs . . . one who 
hangs on the Cross and the other who has ascended 
into Heaven and sits at the right hand of the Heav- 
enly Father; he says I must not pray to the Christ 
who hangs on the Cross and walks on earth." 3 
There he is — back to the actual and historical, his 
feet on the fact ! And to others who spoke of reve- 
lations and visions and voices and the like, he could 
say, "If it were in my handT^I would not wish God 

1 T. M. Lindsay, "Ref ormation," vol. i. p. 440. 
3 "Table Talk," p. 289. Forstemann, ii. p. 412, No. 97. 
M'Giffert, p. 319. 
8 P. Smith, pp. 406-7. 



216 THE PILGRIM 

to speak to me from heaven or to appear to me." x 
"I have (God be praised) learned so much of Him 
[Christ] out of the Scriptures, that I am well and 
thoroughly satisfied; therefore I desire neither to 
see nor to hear Him corporally." 2 Monks and 
prophets may claim these visions ; for him the speech 
of God in facts suffices — and how much it is, when 
one realizes it as he did! It is interesting at the 
same time to find that he has reached the modern 
point of view about psychological ' 'experiences/' 
viz., that they really add very little to anybody, and 
cannot be relied on as new sources of truth. 

No, the Christ who gave Himself for me ("read 
it with great vehemency") is also the risen Christ, 
and that means a life of freedom and happiness for 
those He loves. "Christ comes and sits at the right 
hand, not of the Kaiser (C&saris) — in that case we 
should have perished long since — but at the right 
hand of God. This is an incredible great thing. 
Still, I delight in it, incredible as it is, and I mean 
to die in it. Then why should I not also live in it? 
... If He has lost His title (King of kings) in 
Augsburg, He must also have lost it in heaven and 
on earth." So he wrote to Justus Jonas. 3 At table 
he put it in a grotesque way 4 — "When Christ speak- 

1 Herrmann, p. 188. 

2 "Table Talk," p. 138. 

3 To Jonas, 9 July 1530; Currie, No.. 231, where a good deal 
of it is mistranslated, however. 

4 "Table Talk," p. 143. Forstemann (1844), vol. i. p. 397, 
§132. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 217 

eth a word, He openeth a mouth which is as big as 
heaven and earth. . . . When the emperor speaketh 
a word it is held of some value; but when Christ 
speaketh, He taketh up at one bit heaven and earth. 
Therefore must we regard this man's words other- 
wise than the words of emperors, popes, etc., for 
He is true, and very God." "Does He talk to the 
wind?" he asks Melanchthon (27 June 1530) in one 
of a number of letters full of faith and courage and 
gaiety; "What fear is there for truth if He reigns? 
... It is your philosophy that troubles you so, not 
your Theology. . . . He who has become our 
Father will be the Father of our children. ... As 
for our cause, for my part (whether it is dulness or 
the Spirit, let Christ see to it), I am not much dis- 
turbed ; nay ! I have better hope than I had hoped 
to have." * "If Moses had waited to understand to 
the very end how he was to escape Pharaoh's army, 
Israel would perhaps be in Egypt to this day." 2 
"Lately, I saw two wonders. The first, when I 
looked out of the window and saw the stars in 
heaven, and the whole beautiful dome of God, and 
yet I saw no pillars on which the Master had set his 
dome; and still the heaven did not fall and the dome 
stands firm. Now there are some people who are 
looking for such pillars, and would like to touch 
them and feel them; and because they cannot, they 

1 Currie, No. 225. 

2 To Melanchthon, 29 June 1530; Currie, No. 226. 



218 THE PILGRIM 

fidget and tremble, as if the heaven would certainly 
fall, for no other reason than that they neither feel 
nor see the pillars. If they could feel the pillars, the 
heaven would be safe enough I'" l 

With a faith like this in Christ at God's right 
hand, he can face everything — Duke Georges by the 
reservoirf ul 2 — a devil on every tile in Worms, 
martyrdom, anything, — yes, and temptations and 
troubles of every sort. "The best way to drive out 
the fiend is to despise him and call on Christ, for he 
cannot bear that. You should say to him, Tf you 
are lord over Christ, so be it V That is what I said 
at Eisenach" 3 — which is an even better way of deal- 
ing with him than throwing an inkpot at him. "In 
temptation we must in no wise judge thereof accord- 
ing to our own sense and feeling. . . . Wherefore 
in the midst of thy temptation and infirmity cleave 
only unto Christ and groan unto Him ; He giveth the 
Holy Ghost which crieth Abba Father. . . . The 
Spirit maketh intercession for us in our temptation, 
not with many words or long prayer . . . but only 
uttereth a little sound and a feeble groaning, as Ah 
Father! This is but a little word, and yet notwith- 
standing it comprehended all things. The mouth 
speaketh not, but the affection of the heart speaketh 
after this manner: ' Although I be oppressed with 
anguish and terror on every side, and seem to be 

*To Briick, 5 Aug. 1530; Currie, No. 238. 

a Letter of 5 March 1522, and Carlyle's Essay on "Heroes." 

* P. Smith, p. 126. 



THE RELIGION OF MARTIN LUTHER 219 

forsaken and utterly cast away from Thy presence, 

yet am I Thy child, and Thou art my Father for 

Christ sake; I am beloved because of the Beloved.' " * 

"Whatever comes or shall come or happen, by 

prayer, which is alone the all-powerful Empress in 

human affairs, we shall manage everything, by her 

we shall steer our plans, correct mistakes, put up with 

what we cannot mend, conquer all that is evil, keep 

all that is good — as we have done already down to 

this present, and learnt the power of prayer." 2 In 

this way and in this spirit all duty may be faced, little 

and big. If it comes to martyrdom, "my head is a 

little thing compared with Christ, who was slain with 

the utmost ignominy. . . . This is no place for 

weighing risk and safety ; no, we must take care, on 

the contrary, not to abandon to the contempt of the 

wicked the Gospel, once we have taken it up, nor to 

give the adversaries cause to glory over us, because 

we do not dare to confess what we have taught, and 

fear to shed our blood for it — such cowardice on 

our part, such triumph on theirs, Christ in His 

mercy avert. Amen/' 3 If it is the daily round and 

common task, "what you do in your house is worth 

as much as if you did it up in Heaven for our Lord 

God. ... It looks like a small thing when a maid 

cooks and cleans and does other housework. But 

because God's command is there, even such a lowly 

1 "Galatians," f ol. 191 b, 192 a. 

'Letter to Melanchthon, 8 April 1540; Currie, No. 403. 

"Letter to Spalatin, 21 Dec. 1520; Currie, No. 51. 



220 THE PILGRIM 

employment must be praised as a service of God, far 
surpassing the holiness and asceticism of all monks 
and nuns. Here there is no command of God. But 
there God's command is fulfilled, that one should 
honour Father and Mother and help in the care of 
the house." * "It is not humility/' he said, "if you 
know you are humble." 

There is a religion — Christ at God's right hand 
still, Who loved me and gave Himself for me, and 
a duster or a pen in my hand, and a bit of work to 
do for Him. "He loadeth no heavy burdens upon 
us . . . but will only have that we believe in Him 
and preach of Him [glauben und reden] . But thou 
mayst be sure and certain that thou shall be plagued 
and persecuted therefore; and therefore our sweet 
and blessed Saviour [der treue liebe Herr], giveth 
unto us a comfortable promise, where He saith, T 
will be with you in the time of trouble and will help 
you out/ etc. (Lukexii. 17). I (said Luther) make 
no such promise to my servant when I set him to 
work, either to plow or to cart ; but Christ will help 
me in my need." 2 

1 M'Giffert, p. 177, from a sermon. 

3 "Table Talk," p. 132. Forstemann, i. p. 372, No. 100. 



XII 

A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 



The old Scottish Christianity owed not a little of 
its rugged strength to its firm and clear appre- 
hension of the reality of God's judgnu ~t. The vivid 
picture drawn in the Apocalypse haunted the imagi- 
nation and the memory. There stood the Great 
White Throne, and on it sat One, from whose face 
the earth and the heaven fled away, and there w r as 
found no place for them; but man, in all his guilt 
and triviality, had to confront that face and look it 
straight between the eyes. An awful prospect it 
was for the best of men, but it gave intensity and 
depth to life. All things had to be viewed sub specie 
ceternitatis — how would they look in eternity? 
against that background ? before that throne ? How- 
ever they might look: thus set at last, a man of sense 
would wish to see them so here and now. And the 
deeper men always tended to see them so. 

Hence came much of the Scottish character. Ac- 
customed to look things through and through, the 
Scot had a way of getting to the bottom of whatever 

221 



\ 



THE PILGRIM 

he had in mind. Even before John Knox and the 
Reformation Scotland had treated Philosophy more 
seriously than England ever has, with an emphasis 
on the moral side of it, which Latin Christianity has 
always had from Augustine and Tertullian onward. 
Life, character, society, nation, must rest on the 
ultimate. If the satirist find the real national an- 
them of England in the well-known doggerel — 

God bless the squire and his rich relations, 
And teach us poor our proper stations— 

to a man who was conscious that the squire, or laird, 
and he himself must stand on one footing before 
that face, from whose aspect heaven and earth and 
landed possessions would have fled away, and be 
gone forever, the distinctions of earth would wear 
very thin. And, for good or ill, they did wear thin, 
and there has never been in Scotland that deference 
to position which was long familiar in England. 
And what was true of the squire, was true of priest 
and minister. Men were driven into independence 
of mind as well as into self-criticism; and the con- 
sciousness that the distinction between right and 
wrong, between truth and error, is fundamental and 
eternal gave stamina to both habits. 

It was not peculiar to Scotland, this clear vision of 
the Judgment Day. Tertullian knew it and drew it 
in a terrible picture. The early Christian had it, 
owing something to Jewish and something to Greek 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 

thinkers. The misery of life, the uncertainty of it, 
the flaunting triumph of violence in the age after 
Alexander had driven the Jews of the period to 
postulate another life, where the contrast between 
right and wrong would be brought into clear relief 
for ever, by a judgment of God that should at once 
rid man of his doubts and God of all hint of indif- 
ference. Thought was impossible on other lines. 
Plato, says Mr. R. W. Livingstone, 1 was "a Chris- 
tian born out of due time. His race had held that 
human nature was fundamentally good, and thought 
that knowledge and training would abolish wrong. 
Plato argued that there is an incurably evil element 
in man to which only death can put an end; as the* 
Church argued that there is an incurably evil element 
in him, which can only be quenched by the grace of 
God. Plato's race had held that physical beauty is 
among the highest objects of desire. Plato himself 
thought that the body interferes with the soul, often 
encrusts and embrutes it. He taught men to shun 
its vanities and affections, to leave even politics and 
public life, to devote themselves to the contempla- 
tion of God and the saving of their souls. Plato told 
his disciples to look forward to a future life, to a 
judgment to come, to heaven, hell or purgatory, to a 
scheme of punishments and rewards that followed 

a "The Greek Genius and its Meaning for Us," p. 195- I 
have taken the freedom of leaving out some sentences or half 
sentences, but without changing the meaning of the passage. 



224 THE PILGRIM 

a man's conduct in his time on earth. Plato's race 
had a generous confidence in human nature. Origi- 
nal sin, asceticism, ideas of a future life, strict au- 
thoritarianism — in all these Plato anticipated the 
mediaeval Church." 

So Mr. Livingstone sums up Plato, and then adds 
comment, which I take leave to quote. "Whether 
he is right in his view of human nature, is one of 
the great unsolved questions of the world, and not 
the least interest of his writings is that they raise it 
so clearly. . . . Our own age [19 12] would prob- 
ably decide against him. Things are well with it. It 
is making money fast; education and recreation are 
cheap ; science has removed many causes of misery ; 
savagery and revolution are rare; so at present we 
are riding high on a wave of humanism, and are op- 
timistic about the nature of man, and the rapidity 
of the march on Paradise." In a book published 
since the European War Professor J. B. Bury has 
subjected these ideas of ours to historical inquiry; 1 
whence came our belief in inevitable progress ? how 
old is it ? And it appears that it is scarcely two 
centuries old and depends a good deal on loose think- 
ing about the progress in scientific discovery and 
the application of natural laws to economic proc- 
esses. Altogether the evidence for rejecting Plato's 
view of human nature is not complete, and Plato 
1 "The Idea of Progress." 



A LOST ARTICLE OP FAITH 225 

would still urge that the distinction between right 
and wrong, between truth and error, is more inevi- 
table than human progress, and is independent of it. 



II 

The century, which has seen the swiftest progress 
in mechanical contrivance and the adjustment of 
Nature to comfort, has also seen great changes in 
Christian thought, not all of which however are to 
be associated with that progress. There have been 
growth and development in other ways. A closer 
study of archaeology has shed much light upon Bib- 
lical history, and new canons of historical criticism 
have come in. New knowledge of non-Christian re- 
ligion and non-European thought have modified 
men's views. Above all the return to fact has con- 
centrated Christian students upon the life and mind 
of Jesus Christ. There has been a relative decline 
in the attention given to Systematic Theology and 
a great heightening of interest in the personality of 
Jesus. The old view of the verbal inspiration of the 
Bible is hardly held to-day among educated people; 
its going has relieved Christian thinkers of many 
difficulties which had no existence apart from this 
dogma. The conception of a progressive knowl- 
edge of God was an immense gain. Inspiration had 
in the past been regarded in a mechanical way ; and 
men feel that the inspired writer is of all men least 



THE PILGRIM 

mechanical and above other men sensitive and in- 
dividual. These characteristics were found in dif- 
ferent measure in different authors and periods of the 
Bible; and more stress is now laid on those where the 
new view enables men to feel the greater depth, the 
truer and higher realization of God ; and a new free- 
dom has followed. With the old theory of inspira- 
tion there have faded away other tenets, which, as 
generally presented, rested latterly rather on the 
presumption that "the Scripture cannot be broken" 
than on their value to the Christian soul or their 
congruity with the known character of Jesus of Naz- 
areth. The very statement that "the Scripture can- 
not be broken" coming from the fourth gospel re- 
quired re-examination; what was its origin, its 
meaning? What exactly was Scripture? Which 
books for instance, Ecclesiastes or Ecclesiasticus ? 
and what was to be understood by its breaking? 
The new standard was pre-eminently that of consis- 
tency with the nature and teaching of Jesus. 

The children's hymn, resting on abundant Gospel 
warrant and historically sound, had emphasized the 
"gentle Jesus" ; it was, as far as it went, a true pic- 
ture. The dogma of an irrevocable hell that awaited 
the unconverted, whatever his opportunities or his 
lack of them, immediately on death, had less warrant 
in the teaching of Jesus. Both conceptions must, it 
was taught, be held; but it was done by that human 
habit of thinking in compartments, which we feel to 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 227 

be illegitimate, and yet to which men have often 
owed their sense and their sanity. Two ideas may 
seem to be in conflict, because neither is quite 
grasped, and because their relation is not firmly un- 
derstood. 

With the change in the view of inspiration, the 
closer knowledge of other religions, and the deep- 
ening realization of the character of Jesus issuing 
in new love for him and a new acceptance of him, 
the terrible doctrine of endless hell, which after all 
had really implied the defeat of every purpose Jesus 
had set before him and the invalidity of his most 
fundamental beliefs, faded out of men's minds. It 
was a real gain ; but spiritual gains, like other gains, 
are achieved and held with danger. Freedom is one 
thing for the man who understands its cost, its op- 
portunities and responsibilities, and another for him 
who does not. Before negro emancipation in Amer- 
ica, Lowell's "pious editor" maintained that 

Liberty's a kind of thing 
That don't agree with niggers; 

and what was Lowell's sarcasm is the political re- 
flection of many Southerners and others after the 
event. Freedom is a good thing, the greatest of 
blessings, but it has had ill consequences for those 
who were not trained to think deeply about it, and 
to use it aright. The variant in St. Luke in the 
Bezan Codex attributes this very idea to Jesus: 



THE PILGRIM 

"Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, blessed art 
thou, but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed and 
a transgressor of the law." Misuse of freedom by 
the negro was the nemesis of his enslavement. 

The gain in the newer thought of God was very 
great indeed for those who took Jesus seriously ; for 
others its consequences were less happy ; and in many 
minds there are both strains — seriousness co-exist- 
ing with the natural desire to take things easily. 
For now came the nemesis of thinking in compart- 
ments and of holding ideas imperfectly realized. 
The picture of the "gentle Jesus" remained on one 
side of their minds for some people, and on the other 
side nothing or very little. The adjective swamped 
the substantive; the historical Jesus was lost in the 
sentimentalist's half picture. The real features of 
Jesus' mind were not studied ; and a vague notion of 
"Christian charity," a still vaguer one of "forgive- 
ness," prevailed ; and the moral stamina was so far 
gone from popular Christianity. 

He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well! 

says one of the pots about the potter in Omar Khay- 
yam's "Rubaiyyat"; and it sums up only too ade- 
quately the common theology, sheer travesty as it is 
of everything we find in the thought of Jesus. 

This growing belief, helped by the modern faith 
in the inevitable march of human progress, cut 
across all sound thinking and across action. In the 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 

older days, for instance, the call to the mission field, 
to the propagation of the faith, rang like the tocsin 
in revolutionary Paris for insistence and meaning. 
Moment by moment, it was urged, souls were pass- 
ing to the unthinkable for want of what Christians 
could bring them. This was not precisely the teach- 
ing of Jesus ; but it put in a terrible way, an exag- 
gerated way if you like, a truth that is real enough 
— the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of heathen and 
animistic religious ideas. To-day no one uses the 
old call; and many readers will at once reject even 
the qualified account I have given of the fact behind 
it. The heathen are not counted to be in any very 
special peril ; it is surmised that they have developed 
their own religions in conformity with their own 
spiritual experience, habits of thought and needs ; no 
religion or philosophy, it is urged, has ever held 
men over long tracts of time and wide areas of the 
worl3 without elements of truth ; and it would fol- 
low that by some slow process of evolution heathen- 
dom is slowly but surely making its way to the same 
heavenly Father as Christendom: 

He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well! 

and perhaps he is every whit as pleased with the 
animist as with the Christian, with Animism as with 
Christianity. A new attitude of sympathy to alien 
cults is not to be deprecated ; anything that prompts 
to intelligence of other men's ideas is doubly helpful 



230 THE PILGRIM 

— to the man who understands and to the people un- 
derstood. But it cannot be said that the "good fel- 
low" theology, as a rule, has either rested on intelli- 
gence of the people or matters pronounced upon, or 
led to it. 

The "good fellow" conception of God has also in 
practice, as it was bound to do, encouraged men and 
women (I do not know which more) to drop self- 
criticism and to improvise life as pleasantly as pos- 
sible in such directions as the moment might suggest. 

Myself will to my darling be 
Both law and impulse. 

To what that leads, Plato long ago showed in his 
appalling picture of the "democratic man" whose 
soul is a democracy drunk with the strong wine of 
freedom, where every appetite, every passion, every 
notion is a citizen as well qualified as any other to 
take the lead. 1 Plato may be accused of travesty, if 
he really meant this as a picture of the Athenian 
citizen of his day ; but he is drawing a type which is 
not unfamiliar to us. The real fault which Plato 
finds with the man of this character is that he has 
thought nothing out, that he has no principles, no 
clear idea of right or wrong, of truth or error, that 
he associates no permanent value with the distinction 
between them. 

1 Cf. Plato, "Rep.," viii. 557, 558, 562-565. 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 231 

in 

In the modern line of thought, which I have been 
describing, there are a number of assumptions not 
verified, nor indeed very closely examined — mere as- 
sertions taken to be self-evident, but on examination 
a good deal less certain. The Hindu always tells you 
that you can go to Calcutta by rail or river or road ; 
and he appears to hold that that justifies your travel- 
ling by the least reliable and the least direct of routes. 
It is not always certain that you can get to Calcutta 
by river, for instance, but it is certain that it will 
take you a long time in any case ; and the argument 
overlooks the desirability of reaching Calcutta quick- 
ly, whatever it is, and the advantage, if any, of being 
there. It is not clear that the heathen is better quali- 
fied for working out his own salvation to-day than 
were the Celts and Saxons of our British Islands in 
the fifth and sixth centuries. We owe a great deal 
to those possibly very dogmatic and crude Christian 
missionaries who believed Christ, even as they con- 
ceived of him, to be of more value than the sidhe 
of the Celt and the Odin and Thor of the Saxon. 
They were right. 

There is a good deal in practice to be said for a 
philosophy that imposes upon you intellectual and 
other effort as against one that frees you from it. 
You are more liable to think twice about it. "Evo- 
lution" is a word much on our lips, and it has been 



THE PILGRIM 

applied to every aspect of human life as well as to 
religion. But it is growingly clear that the word is 
loosely used. Dr. Johnson would get very cross 
with one of his old lady pensioners, because, when- 
ever he wanted her to be "categorical," she was 
"wiggle-waggle." Poor old thing ! she was afraid of 
her benefactor, and, like so many of her people, still 
more afraid of coming to grips with an idea. Even 
in the physical world, in the region of biology, it 
would appear that evolution is rather a working hy- 
pothesis for a certain section of the field, than a law 
definitely ascertained and understood in detail. In 
the region of thought it stands on a similar footing 
— it is a suggestion, an attractive suggestion, which 
illustrates a good deal of the known history of 
thought, provided you give the term the meaning 
proper to the subject. But in thought, politics, eco- 
nomics, and religion people use the term without 
proper limitation. The popular mind is more opti- 
mistic about evolution* than the scientific. 1 Even in 
biology, I understand, it is not suggested, as amateur 
biologists might suppose, that the chimpanzees, give 
them time, will develop into a race that produces 
Shakespeares and Isaiahs even better than ours ; still 
less — their shape, of course, is against it — will the 
camels. Whatever was true of their remotest an- 
cestors, these creatures appear to have made their 
way deep into blind alleys, and I do not gather that 
1 Of. Bury, "Idea of Progress," p. 335- 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 233 

biologists are very hopeful that their stocks will ever 
seriously set themselves to retrace their steps. There 
is the real issue. Whether you use the term evolu- 
tion or not, it is historically established that all hu- 
man progress is associated with intellectual choice 
and intellectul effort, and both of them are apt to be 
also moral and individual choice and effort. 

Apply this to religion, and it ceases to be so clear 
that "all will yet be well/' if you let everything drift, 
either for other people or for yourself. For, it may 
be noted, if it is right to let the heathen drift on 
notions which he inherits or picks up, it cannot be 
quite right to educate your own children. I am not 
sure that I am not anticipated here by theorists who 
hold, against Solomon and Socrates and other au- 
thorities, that children do better without guidance or 
discipline, though this, oddly, is more true of their 
minds than of their bodies. The body is more ob- 
viously than the mind amenable to sepsis. There 
are backwaters in religion, and blind alleys in 
thought which lead nowhere, and one great part of 
human experience has been to ticket them. Some 
experiments in conduct hardly need to be repeated; 
there have been enough experiments in theft, murder 
and adultery ; and all over the world men are agreed 
that there is no "evolution" by those routes. Ani- 
mism historically does not mean progress as Chris- 
tianity has meant it ; and if God is as pleased with the 
one as with the otKer, then one feels there is some- 



THE PILGRIM 

thing wrong with His thinking, a conclusion which 
one is reluctant to accept. It is another proposition 
altogether to say that He is as pleased with Animist 
as with Christian; it is not necessarily true, and it 
requires examination and definition before we can 
accept it. It depends a good deal on what the par- 
ticular Animist and the particular Christian under 
consideration are doing with their inherited ideas. 



IV 

It is worthy of remark, and it is perhaps a little 
curious, that the term "reversion" never became so 
popular as "evolution." Perhaps the thing seemed 
less established to the man of science; certainly its 
explanation was not obvious when the term was first 
offered to the world. Progress, however, filled the 
air, and the popular notion of evolution squared with 
the popular notion of progress. 

It is well for men to believe in the possibility of 
progress and achievement. So much done, so much 
solid gain made — and men begin to think relapse no 
longer to be feared. But when we turn to History, 
it gives us pause; the past, as Mark Twain said, in 
one of his philosophic moments, which were many 
and seldom cheerful, the past is "so damned humili- 
ating. " The story of Greece and Rome is full of 
cruelty — civil strife in Greece meant murder, con- 
quest by Rome meant Verres, oppression and slav- 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 235 

ery. But when Christianity ousts the republican 
Sulla and the imperial Maximin, we may hope for 
better things, and we find — Constantius. But he was 
a heretic ; and the Catholic Church triumphant gives 
us Cortes and Pizarro and their hideous aggression 
in the name of Christ, and the Bartholomew mas- 
sacre — and the papal medal of Gregory XIII. com- 
memorating it — and all this after what we call the 
Renaissance. Monarchy and oppression may be 
supposed to go hand in hand ; a French republic sets 
up the guillotine and an American republic burns 
negroes alive by the hundred every year. The Re- 
form Bill was to solve England's problems, and there 
are still men who complain that our social struc- 
ture is in ruins. Where greater freedom reigns, 
Tammany Hall and trusts crush purity and personal 
liberty. It seems that as soon as we defeat one of 
the devil's legions, he has another entrenched on a 
line not very far away. 

It is easy to say that, while this is all true about 
History, it is not the whole truth; the Christian Em- 
pire did secure certain things for the lowly that 
Rome, pagan and noble, never gave — the slave was 
better treated, the ideal of chastity was higher. Im- 
perialis verecundia would have been an epigram in 
Tacitus ; it was historical record in Ammianus Mar- 
cellinus. Cortes was an adventurer, and his conquest 
of Mexico an outrage on the name of Christ; but 
at least human sacrifice was abolished, even if ha- 



THE PILGRIM 

bitual civil war and the exploitation of the Indian 
replace it to-day. The French republic has done 
more for the people than the monarchy did, though 
it has been less brilliant. The American republic has 
given new hopes and happier homes to millions of 
white people, and it did set the negro free at endless 
cost to itself. That is all right enough ; but what is 
the insidious thing in progress that makes it so nec- 
essary for us to apologize for it? Why is the hour 
of victory so fatal to ideals ? 

It means that the popular notion of to-day, ^at 
progress is simple and inevitable evolution, will not 
hold; that human nature cannot be counted upon, 
without the stimulus of an adventure, an enthusiasm, 
an ideal; that, in one form, if not in another, there 
is always an element of evil to be reckoned with, to 
be battled with ; and that life is a harder and more 
difficult campaign than optimists allow — horribly 
hard, to the verge of despair. A large part of the 
Christian world has been simply playing with 
thought; and non-Christians have been alive to the 
facts which Christians have missed. Virgil knew 
long ago — living in the country and among farmers, 
of course he knew how a farm will go back to the 
wild and plants degenerate : 

Yet can I witness that the plant declines, 
Though long-time chosen, conned with utmost care, 
If human energy and human hands 
Fail to search out the fittest year by year. 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 23? 

So are we doomed to speed from bad to worse, 
Ever borne backwards, drifting whence we came, 
As one whose oars can scarcely hold his boat 
Against the stream, who haply slacks his grip, 
Then headlong down the torrent is he swept 
By the mid-flood. 1 

The keynote of his poem is given later — in a line of 
rhythm unusual but suggestive : 

Scilicet omnibus est labor impendendus. 2 

A gospel of ceaseless work is what he preaches, a 
long, a lifelong battle with nature in the physical 
world — with nature who will assuredly undo all you 
have done if you let it alone. So far are we in the 
physical world from inevitable progress and safety 
from reaction. And no one who has treated the 
training of character seriously can suppose things 
different there. 

No! not easy victory and the comparative insig- 
nificance of evil. Plato, the great Hindu teachers, 
the Stoics, all recognize the seriousness of evil. In- 
stead of a god who is "a good fellow — and 'twill all 
be well," they find inexorable law in the Universe. 
"The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind ex- 
ceeding small" is only a monotheistic rendering of a 
Greek proverb. While popular Christianity under- 
estimates sin, outsiders, with their eyes on nature's 
law, say there is no forgiveness of sin any more than 

1 Virgil, "Georgics," i. 197-203 ; Lord Burghclere's transla- 
tion, p. 2TJ. 

2 Virgil, "Georgics," ii. 61. 



238 THE PILGRIM 

there is a theological or magical remedy for physical 
infection. A drunkard produces in himself a certain 
permanent condition; a change of opinion will not 
alter his physical decrepitude, they urge — though 
they may be undervaluing conviction as a means to 
a change of life which will mend him gradually. 
"Injustice," says Carlyle, "always repays itself with 
frightful compound interest." 

The universe of the modern fatalist is in any case 
more wholesome and habitable than the impossible 
and fundamentally immoral affair that some Chris- 
tians make of God's world, with the amiable non- 
entity of their imagination in charge of it, who will 
stand anything and never mind it, whose laws work 
off and on, and who has so general a benevolence for 
right and wrong that he does not notice any par- 
ticular difference between them. A Scottish satirist * 
has hit this figure off exactly ; the old beadle is criti- 
cizing the new minister and his new God : 

A God wha wadna f richt the craws ; 
A God wha never lifts the tawse; 
Wha never heard o' Moses' laws 

On stane or paper; 
A kind o' thowless Great First Cause 

Skinklin' through vapour. 
The auld blue Hell he thinks a haver; 
The auld black Deil a kintry claver ; 
And what is sin, but saut to savour 

Mankind's wersh luggies? 
While saunts, if ye'd believe the shaver, 

Are kirk-gaun puggies. 
*Mr. Hamish Hendry, in "The Beadle's Lament," in his 
volume "Burns from Heaven," Glasgow, 1897. 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 239 

It is the function and the duty of every man to 
think and decide for himself as to life, and among 
other things to determine whether he counts Jesus 
reliable as an observer, if not as a guide. It is worth 
while, then, to remark that Jesus has no responsi- 
bility for this trivial treatment of evil — none. It is 
surprising to note how often, in the language of his 
day, picture-language not literal but intelligible to 
everybody, he refers to the worm and the fire, to 
darkness and gnashing of teeth. "How can you 
escape the damnation of hell? ,, he asked some people 
once, with a directness which, if we had the decency 
to be candid, we should call rather un-Christian in 
our sense, whoever used it. A man who deliberately 
put himself in the way of men who would undoubt- 
edly crucify him — who did it with his eyes open — 5 
cannot be saddled with responsibility for our flimsy 
views of right and wrong. The first step to win the 
respect ol reasonable and sensible men and women 
for his religion must be to confess our disloyalty to 
him on this issue, and to attempt to draw his sharp 
distinction between right and wrong. This will not 
mean a return to a doctrine of hell which we have 
found inconsistent with his spirit and his teaching, 
but a frank and penitent recognition of the deepest 
contrast that the universe has to show. It is no 
compliment to him to suppose that he could have 
missed it. 



240 THE PILGRIM 



More significant than the modern indifference to 
evil is the disbelief in good. Many thinkers have 
recognized evil as of tremendous power in human 
affairs; others have more or less equated them in 
influence, have found a sort of balance in the uni- 
verse, and have allowed consequences to follow good 
where it was operative as surely as they follow evil. 
I have cited Virgil as witness to decline and degen- 
eration in things physical, but one of his cardinal 
principles is summed up in his phrase justissima 
tdlus; earth plays fair by you, gives back what you 
sow, and repays all the care and all the forethought 
you give her. The same idea is in a number of 
Jesus' parables; if bramble and rock are fatal to the 
grain, the good soil yields thirty, sixty, a hundred 
times the seed it receives. 

To apply this to human life calls for a courage not 
common among moralists. To most men nothing is 
so disappointing as human nature. It is a proverb 
that politicians and statesmen let you down — not to 
put it more strongly ; and they infest every part of 
life, not only the state but the church, the college, 
the town council, the vestry. It is a constant com- 
plaint that all commerce and business depend on dis- 
honesty, though here Professor F. G. Peabody has 
brilliantly retorted by appealing to the Stock Ex- 
change, the favourite illustration of those who dis- 



A LOST ARTICLE OF FAITH 241 

believe in truth as a real factor in the business world, 
and has pointed out that of its millions of contracts 
the vast majority are verbal and are kept. Preachers 
habitually emphasize the force of bad example, and 
are right, but they forget that Jesus at least believed 
good to be much more powerful. 

It is quite plain to those who' care to study him, 
that, while Jesus had no illusions about evil, while 
he recognized the eternal distinction between right 
and wrong as valid to the Judgment Day and be- 
yond, he had a faith in good which is not exampled 
elsewhere. His belief in his power to influence men 
so raw and so slow as his disciples — his willingness 
to leave them so little matured as he did, to trust to 
them the whole of his work on earth — a venture 
hard to expect under similar circumstances from 
even the most like him of all his followers — his de- 
liberate choice of the cross — all these speak, more 
plainly even than his parables and his general teach- 
ing, of his faith in good. God is behind it and in it, 
he saw, and there is nothing so fruitful at all. We 
have generally lost that confidence, and venture into 
His service again and again as a forlorn hope ("I 
shall one day fall by the hand of Saul," we say) ; and 
little is to be expected from work attempted in such 
a spirit. It is not justified, this diffidence of ours, 
as our own experience often proves, if we would only 
study it. Depression in sowing seed is a frame of 
mind recognized in the Psalms as not inconsistent 



242 THE PILGRIM 

with abundant harvest; the thing is to get the seed 
fairly into the ground. Jesus trusts both the seed 
and the soil, knowing Who made them both and 
made them for one another. 

We have to recapture his faith in God, his convic- 
tion of God's nature and goodness, and his assurance 
that God triumphs in a world, which, after all, He 
appears to have designed for the carrying out of His 
own purposes. The Great White Throne is a vivid 
rendering of the faith of Jesus that Right is funda- 
mentally different from Wrong and habitually and 
finally triumphs over Wrong, because God is with 
the Right. Certainly the story of the Christian 
Church, if we would take the trouble to know it and 
to understand it, should give us courage. Where 
has the Gospel failed, when men have taken it se- 
riously, lived on it and secured that it was intelligibly 
presented to their fellow-men? 

The grey world of our theology, or philosophy, or 
whatever we call it, is not the real world; it is not 
confirmed by good pagan thinkers ; it is not in Jesus' 
picture of God. We pay the penalty inevitably 
whenever we try to live in a non-existent world. 
Greyness only belongs to a climate of cloud and fog ; 
and the moral world is not grey, it is a region of 
colour, where the shadows are very black indeed, 
because the sunshine is very bright 



XIII 

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 



The story may be apocryphal, but it is told of a 
well-known poet, that his wife invaded his study one 
morning and set him to read "a portion of God's 
Word," that he obeyed, and that, when a little later 
his son came in and saw what he was reading, the 
poet looked up and said: "My boy, you should 
always read the Bible; there's nothing like it for your 
style." 

There is a great deal in what the poet so unex- 
pectedly said ; but it turns on what we mean by style. 
For the moment let us be content to say that a race, 
in one way or another, produces a speech, which 
men of genius, if the race breed them, may develop 
into the most sensitive organ for expressing what 
is deepest and truest in human experience. By style 
we mean the instinct for using that organ to its full 
capacity, and style is acquired or perfected by famil- 
iarity with those who have it; it is a gift of associa- 
tion. The English speech is the slow-grown lan- 
guage of a race. Celt and Saxon and others have 

243 



244 THE PILGRIM 

made and remade that race and that speech; but its 
character was given to race and to speech as much by 
the English Bible of 1611 and its predecessors, as by 
any other influence. 

It is common knowledge that a committee never 
writes English; how King James' revisers escaped 
the common fate of committees and produced so 
great a monument of genuine English, is a theme 
well worthy of study. The first and most obvious 
solution of the problem is that the book was mainly 
the work of one man; but, even so, a group of men 
— two or three — will spoil the sense, the spirit, the 
cadences of the purest and strongest of writers. 
Tyndale, the author of the fabric on which the 
Jacobeans worked, was a sturdy, strong, if rather 
insular, character, with an inborn directness and 
grace of speech, and he had the great advantage of 
having no colleagues, none at least to whom he was 
bound to defer. To read the Gospels through in his 
version is to see how essentially he remains the Eng- 
lish translator. Whatever the revisers of Geneva 
and of 161 1 did, the body of the work was and is 
Tyndale's. 1 He had the good fortune to live and 
work at a time when men wrote by ear and instinct 
what they felt; and even in 161 1 there was no jour- 
nalism, no sham scientific jargon, and the flamboy- 
ant pedantries of Euphues and Holofernes were 

*See Westcott (Aldis Wright), "History of English Bible/' 
p. 158. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 245 

after all a better training. Pedantry is easier to 
get rid of than slovenliness. 

Tyndale's mastery of English, plain and simple, 
but capable of strength and feeling in its purity, se- 
cured that the later versions should not be cast in 
another mould ; and he and his successors set a stand- 
ard for English for all time. 

Selden complained that "the Bible is rather trans- 
lated into English words than into English phrases. 
The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that 
language is kept." Perhaps they were, here and 
there; but the structure of the Hebrew language, to 
which all faithful translators had to be loyal, was 
not so very alien to that of the English actually 
spoken by men, as William Wordsworth put it — not 
so alien that it was impossible or even difficult ta 
transfer thoughts simply and naturally from the one 
to the other. 1 The simplicity of the original had a 
part in securing the simplicity of the rendering. 
But when even a translator like Chapman could sa 
miss the directness of Homer as to make Troy "shed 
her towers for tears of overthrow," 2 the simplicity 
of the original is not a complete explanation. The 
dogma of inspiration forbade embroidery, and bound 
the translators to the strictest loyalty to the old and 
simple phrase that was consistent with the freedom 
of their own speech. Nor was the certainty of bitter 

1 This point did not escape Tyndale. 

2 See Matthew Arnold, "On Translating Homer," p. 29 
(toward end of first essay). 



246 THE PILGRIM 

controversy on every disputable passage without its 
effect. No doubt, the Biblical scholar can still rec- 
ognize at a glance in a hundred places the Hebrew 
or the Greek behind the rendering, but the whole 
does not suggest a translation. It seems more native 
to us than the English prose of the period. In spite 
of the Hebraisms or Hellenisms that survived trans- 
lation, in spite of Latinisms that stole in at a time 
when educated England Latinized deliberately and 
lapsed into Latin constructions by accident, the Bible 
of 1611 was in English; andlts very Hebraisms and 
Hellenisms became English. 

Even for those who read the Greek Testament 
freely enough, the Authorized Version is, in a way, 
more essentially the Word of God than the Greek 
text; it comes nearer home, it is God speaking in 
English more genuinely than men said He did in 
other tongues at Pentecost, in the language of the 
heart. Modern discovery has proved that "the lan- 
guage of the Holy Ghost," as scholars once called 
it, was just ordinary Greek, the speech in which men 
wrote letters to their wives and little boys to their 
fathers. 1 The language of our English Bible is for 
us instinct with more beauty than the Hellenistic 
Greek, it carries more associations ; there are chords 
of sympathy within us, which that Greek tongue will 
not readily make vibrate, but which respond in an 

1 J. H. Moulton, "Prolegomena to Grammar of N.T. Greek/' 
PP. 3, 5. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 247 

instant to the simpler and nobler speech of the gen- 
erations that made our Reformation. It is in such 
a dialect that God and Nature speak to us — in words 
which want no dictionary or commentary, for the 
meaning of which we need no papyrus fragments to 
enlighten us. It is surely not fanciful to find a 
training in style in the study of such a language. 

What the language of the English Bible can do 
for those who will read it with feeling, and sur- 
render, we know from the books of John Bunyan 
and the speeches of John Bright. Ruskin, Carlyle, 
Newman, Wordsworth, all masters of style, had one 
view of the English Bible. In it Abraham Lincoln 
learnt the language in which he reached the hearts 
of men, he had "mastered it so that he became al- 
most 'a man of one book.' " As Coleridge said, 
"intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from 
being vulgar in point of style." 

Let us gather up our threads. "There's nothing 
like it for your style/' said the poet. A race and a 
language grow up together, reacting on each other. 
If that language is yours, if you belong to that race, 
if you wish to speak to its heart, you must know 
both race and speech at their highest and best, and 
know them long. The Bible was done into English 
in the most formative generations of our history. 
It took long to perfect it, to assimilate every shade of 
meaning in the original and to give it again in Eng- 
lish, but the task was achieved; and a version was 



248 THE PILGRIM 

made that has won and keeps the affection of Eng- 
lishmen, and has done more than any other book — 
even if we count in Shakespeare — to mould our 
speech and to shape our national character. 



II 

Little consciousness is betrayed by the authors of 
the Gospels or by St. Paul 1 that their writing is in- 
spired; Luke writes a preface, on the contrary, that 
suggests he felt himself like other men who write 
books, bound to use every faculty he had of study 
and research, of comparison and criticism. The 
great New Testament writers are like the Greeks 
animated by interest in their subject and the human 
feeling that other men must be interested in it too. 
Throughout the early ages of the Church the same 
conviction lived, and is witnessed to by the many 
translations made of the New Testament into the 
languages of the ancient world. For the early 
Church the Bible was an open book and its daily 
reading in the family was inculcated. 2 In the fourth 
and fifth centuries Jerome revised the Latin transla- 
tion, not with complete approbation among contem- 
porary churchmen for his presuming to meddle with 

1 Paul's words in i Cor. vii. 10, 12, 25, 40 are hard to con- 
strue into such a claim of inspiration as his readers have 
sometimes made on his behalf. 

2 Harnaok, "Bible-Reading in the Early Church," p. 145, p, 
55; Tertullian, "Ad Uxorem," ii. 6; Clement Alex., "Strom," 
vii. 7, 49. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 249 

a familiar text. And then followed a really strange 
development. With the fall of the Empire came 
new tongues, into some of which, Gothic, for ex- 
ample, the Bible was translated. But a nimbus grew 
up round Jerome's version, which neither he nor his 
contemporaries could have foreseen, and a dogma 
that Latin was after all the language of the Holy 
Ghost. The Vulgate of Jerome became canonized, 
and in the Middle Ages there was the bitterest op- 
position to the reading of the Bible in the native 
languages of the several countries. Roman Catholic 
writers deny this, but until they reply satisfactorily 
to the researches of scholarship, the denial is of no 
moment. 

Thus Miss Deanesley in "The Lollard Bible/' a 
work of remarkable learning, brings evidence to 
show that knowledge of the text of Scripture was 
in a layman a presumption of heresy ; "the first and 
primary question is whether the suspected heretic 
has ever heard or learned the words of the German 
Gospels" (p. 62). The Waldensians "give all their 
zeal to lead many others astray with them; they 
teach even little girls the words of the gospels and 
epistles, so that they may be trained in error from 
their childhood" (p. 63). "For most people," she 
shrewdly concludes (p. 88), "assistance at a book- 
burning was a far more frequent source of educa- 
tion than the study of provincial synods/' and there 
was plenty of opportunity for such education. "The 



250 THE PILGRIM 

value of an English Bible was not the foundation 
stone in John Wycliffe's theory for the reform of 
Church and State, but the practical measure to which 
his theories led him at the end of his life" (p. 225) ; 
and the essential novelty of the Wycliffite transla- 
tions was that they were designed for publication, 
for reading in a wider public and a lower social class 
than royal dukes and other noble bibliophiles (p. 
227). It was understood that the clergy did not 
want them to be read, and in Lollard trials witnesses 
often deposed that they had heard the accused read- 
ing in a book of the gospels in English, or some other 
biblical book, and therefore knew he was a heretic 
(p. 326). It followed that, when printing was es- 
tablished in England, the Scriptures in English were 
not printed for half a century. 

It is arguable that educated England was more 
open in the sixteenth century to foreign ideas than 
in the nineteenth. First the Reformation and the 
Counter-Reformation, then Stuart wars, and finally 
the French Revolution all helped to secure our island 
against foreign influences. But one of the surprises 
that await the reader in the earlier century is the 
quick and keen transmission of ideas. Early in the 
reign of Henry VIII Cambridge scholars gathered 
quietly to an obscure inn in Piute's Lane — some- 
where behind the present Bull Hotel or on the site 
of the new parts of King's College — to read the 
newcome works of Luther. Nor was Oxford im- 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 251 

mune, though Cambridge is the University identified 
with the Reformation. As early as 1523 we find de- 
bate in a country house near Little Sodbury, in 
Gloucestershire, on the new ideas spreading from 
Germany upon religion. The tutor of the family, a 
young Gloucestershire man, himself educated at Ox- 
ford (but, regrettably, it seems not at Cambridge 
also, as was long ago believed) took up the cause of 
the new movement, and would argue with the guests 
of the house, "communing and disputing" — an ad- 
mirable and Socratic way of learning — "with a cer- 
tain learned man," writes Foxe, 1 "in whose com- 
pany he happened to be, he drove him to that issue] 
that the learned man said, 'We were better be with- 
out God's laws than the Pope's.' Master Tyndale 
hearing that answered him, 'I defy the Pope and all 
his laws'; and said, 'If God spare my life, ere many 
years I will cause that a boy that driveth the plough 
shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest/ " 
The promise is a famous one, and it was fulfilled 
within five years. For in 1 525-1 526, Tyndale put 
the first New Testament, rendered into English from 
the Greek, through the press — a translation made by 
himself from the third edition of Erasmus' Greek 
text — but at what cost! He had had to leave his 
native land for ever, to face, as he says, "poverty, 
exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst 

a Edition of 1563, quoted by Demaus, "Tyndale" (1886), 
p. 72. 



252 THE PILGRIM 

and cold, great dangers and innumerable other hard 
and sharp fightings. 5 ' His book very soon, and him- 
self at last (1536) were burnt; but enough copies 
escaped the flames to be multiplied anew in authentic 
and other editions, till at last he revised it himself 
and reissued it in 1534. 

Tyndale' s work drew upon him a great storm of 
denunciation. Tunstal, Bishop of London, preached 
against the book at Paul's Cross, and declared : 

That he found errors more or less 

Above three thousand in the translation. 1 

So wrote Roye, faithfully recording Tunstal's ser- 
mon, in a poem which displeased Tyndale; "it be- 
cometh not the Lord's servant to use railing rhymes.' 5 
Three thousand blunders seems a large number. Sir 
Thomas More, who let himself go in invective 
against Tyndale more than once, was more moderate 
at this point; "above a thousand texts in it were 
wrong and falsely translated," it was ' 'corrupted and 
changed from the good and wholesome doctrine of 
Christ to devilish heresies of his own." 

Tyndale wrote a reply. "There is not so much as 
one i therein, if it lack a tittle over his head, but 
they have noted it, and number it unto the ignorant 
people for an heresy." He had foreseen that errors 
would occur. "Where they find faults, let them 
show it me, if they be nigh, or write to me if they 
* Quoted by Demaus, "Tyndale," p. 150. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 253 

be far off; or write openly against it and improve 
it, and I promise them, if I shall perceive that their 
reasons conclude, I will confess mine ignorance 
openly/' He goes further, and requests "that they 
put to their hand to amend it, remembering that so 
is their duty to do." 

One of the main charges was that Tyndale used 
native English for the terms of Greek and Latin that 
had become technical. "You wrote," says an envoy 
of the English government to his chief, "that the 
answer which he made to the Chancellor was un- 
clerkly done; and so seem all his works to eloquent 
men because he useth so rude and simple style. . . ." 
So men had said of the Old Latin, and of the Greek; 
so had Paul said of himself ; so said the critics about 
Euripides 1 and Wordsworth in turn. "By this 
translation," wrote another, "shall we lose all these 
Christian words, penance, charity, confession, grace, 
priest, church, which he always calleth a congrega- 
tion." This charge Sir Thomas More also took up, 2 
but Tyndale was equal to a reply; certain of these 
terms were "the great juggling words wherewith, 
as St. Peter prophesied, the clergy made merchandise 
of the people." But he admitted that seniors for 
priests could be bettered, and substituted eiders. Sir 
Thomas returned to the attack — he spent his later 
years on it voluminously — "This drowsy drudge 

1 Longinus, 40. 

a His controversy with Tyndale, Demaus, "Tyndale," ch. ix. 



254 THE PILGRIM 

hath drunken so deep in the devil's dregs, that, but 
if he wake and repent himself the sooner, he may- 
hap ere aught long to fall into the mashing-fat, 
and turn himself into draff as the hogs of hell shall 
feed upon and fill their bellies thereof." More has a 
great name in English history, but neither that name 
nor his gifts in controversy can obscure the fact that 
the Greek presbyteros does mean senior or elder and 
does not mean priest, and never did till Cyprian's 
day ; and why should the boy that driveth the plough 
not be told what the New Testament really said? 

Other people even then saw more than this in 
Tyndale. "The man," wrote an envoy of Thomas 
Cromwell, "is of a greater knowledge than the 
King's Highness doth take him for, which well ap- 
peareth by his works." He had the instinct of the 
real scholar; his account of his view of translation 
anticipates Jowett's canons of interpretation. What 
did the author, not the commentator, mean to say? 
"Scripture," he wrote, 1 "hath but one sense, which is 
the literal sense. And that literal sense is the root 
and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, 
whereto if thou cleave thou canst never err or go 
out of the way. And if thou leave the literal sense, 
thou canst not but go out of the way. . . . Allegory 
proveth nothing, neither can do. For it is not the 
Scripture but an ensample or a similitude borrowed 
of the Scripture. ... If I could not prove with an 
^emaus, "Tyndale," p. 198. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 255 

open text that which the allegory doth express, then 
were the allegory a thing to be jested at, and of no 
greater value than a tale of Robin Hood." If 
Luther pointed the way here, Tyndale had the solid 
sense to see that it was the right way, and all sound 
scholarship has followed in it ever since. "Authen- 
tic words be given, or none," was Wordsworth's 
judgment on doctored fragments of Simonides. 

The soundness of Tyndale's scholarship was 
proved by the way it stood. Battle after battle was 
fought by Reformers and Papists, constantly on the 
ground of the text of Scripture; version aft^r ver- 
sion was made, and the 1611 revisers were referred 
still to Tyndale, whom with others they used and 
whose wording like those others they kept. "It is 
impossible," wrote Professor B. F. Westcott, 1 "to 
read through a single chapter without gaining the as- 
surance that Tyndale rendered the Greek text di- 
rectly, while he still consulted the Vulgate, the Latin 
translation of Erasmus, and the German of Luther" ; 
and later he adds that Tyndale used them "with the 
judgment of a scholar. His complete independence 
in this respect is the more remarkable from the pro- 
found influence which Luther exerted upon his writ- 
ings generally." His prologue to Hebrews is cited 
as an illustration of this independence. It is noted — 
and this is surely an English trait — that he does not 

1 Westcott, "History of English Bible" (edited by W. Aldis 
Wright), pp. 132, 146. 



256 THE PILGRIM 

allow so large a place to" the reader's own subjective 
judgments as Luther. Fidelity to the text was his 
aim — always the scholar's aim: "I call God to 
record against the day we shall appear before our 
Lord Jesus Christ to give reckoning of our doings, 
that I never altered one syllable of God's word 
against my conscience." Sound learning, the use of 
the best helps available, independence, loyalty to his 
text and his author; to these add for a translator 
the language really used by men and the genius to 
make that language live and glow with the life and 
passion of the original ; and little more can be asked. 

"Our English tongue," wrote Thomas Fuller, a 
century later commingling blame and praise, "was 
not improved to that expressiveness whereat this 
day it is arrived." But the plain style has prevailed, 
and when Englishmen wish to be taken seriously, 
whether in prose or verse, they use essentially the 
language that Tyndale used; and William Words- 
worth, in his preface to "Lyrical Ballads" in 1800, 
wrote the justification of that language. 

Once more to sum up: It appears that Wycliffe 
and Tyndale had the same design — to put the Bible, 
and especially the New Testament, in the plainest 
and most intelligible English consistent with faith- 
fulness to the original, into the hands of every man 
— of the "boy that drive th the plough" — to bring it 
effectively into national life, and to make it an in- 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 257 

tegral element of the English character, understood 
and absorbed till it should transform English nature. 
And this they fairly achieved. 



ni 

"Consider the great historical fact that, for three 
centuries, this book has been woven into the life of 
all that is best and noblest in English history; that 
it has become the national epic of Britain and is as 
familiar to noble and simple, from John o' Groat's 
House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once 
were to the Italians ; that it is written in the noblest 
and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beau- 
ties of mere literary form; and finally, that it for- 
bids the veriest hind who never left his village to 
be ignorant of the existence of other countries and 
other civilizations, and of a great past stretching 
back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations of 
the world." 

So wrote T. H. Huxley, an independent witness, 
surely, if there was one (Essays iii, 397). 

On 7 March 1528 John Pykas of Colchester was 
brought before Bishop Tunstal on a serious charge, 
and he confessed that "about two years last past he 
bought in Colchester, of a Lombard of London, a 
New Testament in English and paid for it four shil- 
lings, which New Testament he kept, and read it 
through many times/' Nothing could keep Tyn- 



258 THE PILGRIM 

dale's book out of England, neither the government 
nor the price, for four shillings meant a good deal 
of money four centuries ago. The book was quietly 
hawked about; it was bought and read — "read 
through many times" — and fresh copies came, and 
then fresh versions ; and what men learnt from it is, 
as Huxley says, woven into the very fabric of Eng- 
lish life and history. How is a man to understand 
English life or English history if he has no knowl- 
edge of the book which Englishmen have read incom- 
parably more intensely than any other literature at 
all? 

Tyndale did other work with his pen beside trans- 
lating the New Testament and some part of the Old ; 
and in one of his other books we read: "Though 
every man's body and goods be under the king, do he 
right or wrong, yet is the authority of God's Worci 
free and above the king; so the worst in the realm 
may tell the king, if he do him wrong, that he doth 
naught." A century later Charles I. succeeded to 
the throne of a nation which had steadily read Tyn- 
dale's Testament, the Genevan and the others, for a 
hundred years, and he found a people transformed 
from the subjects of Henry VIII. Tyndale did not 
stop there. "If my neighbour need and I give him 
not, neither depart [i.e. divide, as in the marriage 
formula] liberally with him of that which I have, 
then withhold I from him unrighteously that which 
is his own. ... In those goods which are gotten most 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 259 

truly and justly are men much beguiled. For they 
suppose they do no man wrong in keeping them." 
It has a surprisingly modern sound, this sentiment — 
surprising at least for those who suppose that social 
righteousness was an idea first hatched in the later 
nineteenth century and outside the churches. 

It was at Worms that Tyndale made his transla- 
tion of the New Testament. The next of the three 
great English versions was made at Geneva by the 
friends of John Knox — a name that recalls a great 
deal of Scottish history, the threads of which are all 
interwoven with the Bible. As for England, the 
Puritan emigrations; the long and painful battles 
at home for freedom, for the emancipation of the 
negro, for the Factory Acts ; the steady inculcation 
of duty; the teaching of all the philosophy English- 
men or perhaps Scots really have, the fostering of 
independence — everything of moment in our life and 
history — is linked with the study of this book. 
Other lands have their histories as well as England 
and Scotland; what of Imperial Rome, of Spain and 
Germany, of France and Russia, ancient and mod- 
ern? Is it not true that the Bible and the religion 
connected with it have been at or near the heart of 
all the great movements of civilized men ? Not per- 
haps of the movements that make noise for a while 
and after that have a mere antiquarian interest, but 
the real movements — Constantine, the Crusades, the 
Reformation, the planting of America, and even 



260 THE PILGRIM 

modern democracy, Transatlantic and Tolstoian. In 
one way or another, appealing or rejected, the Bible 
is relevant to them all. The formative men, as we 
have seen, have again and again been under its in- 
fluence, consciously or unconsciously. If our study 
of History is to be more than formal or superficial 
we have to reckon with the power exerted by the 
Bible. 

Once again let us sum up what we have reached. 
The original writers of the Bible were men speaking 
to men of what they deemed to be supremely rele- 
vant; and so it proved. After three centuries Je- 
rome felt it urgent for the Latin-speaking world to 
have their exact word and thought, as closely ren- 
dered as scholarship and old associations would allow. 
After other centuries Wycliffe had Jerome's version 
done into English, or did it himself, because it was 
to give the motive and the assurance for a better 
national life. Later again Erasmus devoted himself 
in Cambridge to editing as correct a Greek text of 
the New Testament as the known manuscripts and 
the existing knowledge of their relations with one 
another permitted. That text Luther did into Ger- 
man, and Tyndale into English with every care, in 
the same conviction that the books bore upon life as 
no others did. The literary work of both men went 
far to shape the history of German and of English 
literature, and the social and political effects of their 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 261 

translations justified their belief that the two Testa- 
ments were relevant to the life of their time and 
every time. 

A century of translators, and four centuries of 
readers have woven the Bible into national life, 
national speech and national literature. If style is 
to be achieved by models, here is the most essentially 
native book in our tongue, more English (in spite of 
its Hebrew and Greek originals) than any other 
English book, more widely accepted than any other, 
and more intimately related in word and history to 
the genius of our people. To know intensely the 
genius of one's people, their mind, their deepest 
hopes and aspirations, their memories, associations 
and intimacies, the things that mean nothing to 
strangers and everything to them — some such train- 
ing will be necessary for the man who is to speak to 
his people in a language that will reach and stir their 
hearts. Other elements have indeed gone to the 
making of the English people, but that does not alter 
the fact that the Bible is something very like 

The master-light of all our seeing. 

Men quote it relevantly and irrelevantly ; its phrases 
pervade our speech ; its cadences and rhythms haunt 
our writers and speakers ; and with serious thinkers 
of our race it is common knowledge that here they 
touch what is most fundamental in all life. 



262 THE PILGRIM 

IV 

"Style," said the finest of ancient critics, "is 
the echo of a great nature" ("yipos fjLeya\o<j)poavvrjs 
airrjxn^)* Whether we render the word of Longinus 
a great nature, or a great soul, or a great mind, the 
adjective is constant, and the translators mean the 
same thing. Mind, soul, nature — the fundamental 
being of the man, his very essence must have great- 
ness, if he is to manage that greatest of achieve- 
ments — speech that reaches the heart of man and 
lives there for ever. "We have to do with an en- 
dowment rather an acquirement," says Longinus; 
it is "a thing given" rather than one "gained" ; but 
all the same tKe gift has to be developed, we must 
"nurture our souls, as far as is possible, to all that is 
great (7rp6s rd neykdrj), and make them, as it were, 
pregnant with noble inspiration. ... It is not pos- 
sible for men whose thoughts are mean and slavish, 
and whose lives embody such thoughts, to put forth 
anything that is wonderful or worthy of immortal- 
ity. It is from the lips of men of high spirit that the 
great accents fall." Longinus illustrates his thesis 
with a saying of Alexander, but a gap in the manu- 
script cuts it away. Later on, where the manuscript 
serves us again, he is quoting Homer to show how 
greatly men may conceive of gods, and then some- 
what to the surprise of those who know how little 
apt Greeks were to look outside their own national 
literature, he adds : "Thus too the lawgiver of the 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 263 

Jews, no ordinary man, worthily conceived and 
worthily expressed the power of the Godhead, when 
at the very beginning of his laws he wrote, 'God 
said' — what? 'Let there be light and there was 
light ; let there be earth and there was earth.' " x 

So to achieve style we need the dower of a great 
soul, and we have to give it a great training. We 
must be able "to choose/' as Longinus goes on to 
say, "the most vital things," and to "make them form 
as it were one body." 2 The English words have lost 
their value and lustre; a corpus juris, a corpus in- 
scriptionum*, and their English equivalents suggest 
death, the Greek word suggests life. What are, in 
anything we have to understand and then perhaps to 
describe, the essential things, the things that make 
it what it is and without which it would not be that 
at all? It is a task of spiritual diagnosis. Can you 
recapture these, and then — the word will come back 
to the English pen, though it is wrong — fuse them ? 
No, not fuse them, but so bring them together that 
together they form a living whole. A tragedy, said 
Aristotle long before, 3 must be "a whole of some 
magnitude, and a whole is something that has begin- 
ning, middle, and end ; it is the same for the beauti- 
ful and for the living creature." He uses the com- 
parison of the living animal and not idly. Life, the 

1 Longinus, 9. 

2 Longinus, 10. 

8 Aristotle, "Poetics," 7, p. 1450 b. 



264 THE PILGRIM 

organic relation of whole and part, the essential, the 
vital — a man of genius is needed to know these and 

Out of three sounds to make, not a fourth sound, but a star. 

Given genius, or some gift that might develop into 
it, what is to be its training? How is one to train 
the instinct for what Longinus calls ra /ccupicbrara 
— the most essential ? Here Plato, as always, comes 
to our help. "The unexamined life is unlivable for 
a human being," he says in a sentence that can 
hardly be quoted too often; and elsewhere he adds 
that man is to practice "the contemplation, the study 
of all time and all existence." Postponing "all exist- 
ence' ' for a moment, we are called on to study all 
human experience, a large task; we are to be heirs 
of all the ages and to enter effectively on our inherit- 
ance. Nothing human is to be alien to us, but we 
have to know exactly what is vital and essential in 
it. I string together phrases from the Classics, be- 
cause I want to relate our particular subject to litera- 
ture, thought and experience in general; and after 
all it is only carrying out Plato's injunction. 

The great danger of modern education is the 
groove. Even the Universities now conceive it part 
of their function to be technical schools in a prac- 
tical age, and a man may graduate Master of Arts 
(so forgetful are we of the meaning of words and 
the ideals they are meant to carry) on a knowledge 
of one art only or one science, if a knowledge of 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 265 

bolts and rivets and cranks is rightly to be called 
either science or art. Can a man be called educated 
who has never intellectually got outside the insular 
and the contemporary ? Can he be called a man at 
all? It is not so that men are made. At the dawn 
of history, the poet gives us a man who "saw the 
cities of many men and learnt their mind." It was 
this gift of travel in the things of the mind that 
made Greece, this faculty for human experience, get- 
ting inside the minds of many men, very alien men, 
strange in habit, tradition and outlook. When 
Greece grew too great to learn any more from the 
barbarian her decline began. Her rejuvenator, Al- 
exander the Great, was one of those great minds 
everywhere at home and everywhere alive to human 
greatness, everywhere capable of understanding it 
and enjoying it. Is it possible that we Anglo-Saxons, 
who are not usually considered by impartial observ- 
ers to have all the gifts and graces of the Greek (to 
say nothing of the Italian and some other races not 
ungifted), that we, of all people, can be sufficient to 
ourselves ? Was Heine's dcktbrittische Beschrankt- 
heit really meant for praise ? Does it really help us ? 
Here then is a whole literature ready to our hand 
very foreign indeed, and yet not foreign but famil- 
iar, woven into our own race and speech as we have 
seen, without which our own stock is not intelligible, 
a literature which will reveal to us our own people 
and the foreigner. In speech and thought, in Ian- 



266 THE PILGRIM 

guage with all its shades and subtleties, its implica- 
tions and preconceptions, it is alien from ours — the 
expression of peoples separated from us by time 
and race and civilization, and by things of more mo- 
ment, by all that we sum up as genius. And yet the 
gulf is bridged for us, partly by the historic connex- 
ion of that literature with our own history, literary, 
political, and religious, and partly by the vitality of 
the books the men wrote. Amos was a Semite, a 
shepherd, perhaps subject to psychopathic experience 
strange to us, but a thinker as modern as any of us, 
as clear as a Greek in his instinct for ra Kcupuorara; 
and his book is a plea for that social righteous- 
ness of which we talk so much and so centrifu- 
gally, a plea stronger than the book printed last 
month, because less diffuse, more restrained, and 
more theocentric. But even the Old Testament has 
deeper books than Amos. 

Take them together and let a man try to under- 
stand them, let him try to put himself successively 
at the points of view taken by those old Testament 
writers, work out their problems from their stand- 
point, never forgetting his own; let him try to be 
just to them, to understand them with the sympathy 
which is the gist of intelligence; and will not the 
steady effort be an education in itself? And the 
growing gift for relating ages, to one another, the 
problems of an older with those of a younger gen- 
eration, the growing ability to see "all time and all 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 267 

existence," to get above parochial and British out- 
looks, and to know Man and to think universally — 
can our modern educational systems find better help 
for developing this endowment? All this foreign 
and ancient experience, remember, linked with a lit- 
erature wrought into our own being. 

Or, again, to take the New Testament, it is sur- 
prising to find how many people, who would call 
themselves Christians, have little conception of the 
central ideas of Jesus, how his mind moved, or what 
he meant by the words he used. And yet, whatever 
our theology, historically, Jesus must be understood 
by any one who aspires to any sort of culture, to 
know, that is, anything of the real life and mind of 
nineteen centuries that have made us. I say nothing 
for the moment of accepting the standpoint or the 
views of Jesus ; it is of little use to accept them with- 
out understanding them; but in any case they have 
been formative in European history, in art and in 
literature. Of Paul I need not here add a word, 
but that his influence too merits being at least un- 
derstood. 

Old and New Testaments alike are full of books 
intensely alive, written in a way that overcomes time 
and space, makes us kin with the writers, and brings 
us inside their minds and their experience. Study, 
of course, is needed — the more the better. But, after 
all, however much more remunerative they may be 
to intensive study, the really great books of the 



268 THE PILGRIM 

world are amazingly intelligible without commen- 
taries at all. Callimachus may need the commen- 
tator, and be worthless when explained. How much 
has been written of the Odyssey to elucidate it for 
scholars — and a child of five may be at home in it for 
ever! Real people always understand real books, 
and real books only need real people; and not all 
commentators are supremely real, or they might be 
doing something more original. Is there not some- 
thing to be said for the training of Mary Lamb, 
tumbled, as her brother said, into a room full of 
good literature? Is there not something of this in 
the practice of encouraging children to begin the 
regular habit of Bible-reading, if only for education? 
Let them really read it, and they will understand fast 
enough what is meant for them ; and what is harder, 
or what older (and duller) people call unsuitable, 
they will pass over, and it will not hurt them. The 
effort to penetrate the foreign medium — puzzling* 
out the allusions to foreign ways that perplex, com- 
paring, reflecting — is it not essentially Odysseus 
again "seeing the cities of many men and learning 
their mind" ? And, when one reflects of how many 
English generations they will be repeating the ex- 
perience, it will not seem improbable that they will 
end with more understanding of thqir own people. 
But after all, as we have seen, it is t& /catptwrara, 
the essential and vital things, that matter. The 
worst of current literature is that it is unsorted; 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 269 

we read, like the undergraduate Wordsworth, "laz- 
ily in trivial books' ' and forget them very properly, 
but our time may be gone. This is where the Clas- 
sics of the races count ; they have not lived for noth- 
ing. In this busy and careless world, where we 
"scrap" everything we can, and as soon as we can, 
some books refuse to be "scrapped," they go living 
on. When a book can maintain itself for a century, 
there is something in it, when for many centuries, 
there is a great deal in it; and when it laughs at 
oceans and barriers of race and speech as well as at 
time, we may be sure it is relevant to us ; when we 
feel, as Montaigne did about Plutarch, that "we can- 
not do without him," what quality does that imply? 
and when myriads of men and women of different 
races and cultures, in widely remote lands and ages, 
say of the Bible in all sorts of translations that they 
"cannot do without it," what does that mean? Does 
it not suggest that here they find what they know to 
be real in the deepest sense? Boswell and Words- 
worth are very dear to Englishmen, but somehow 
foreigners miss them. Isaiah and Luke, Paul and 
Jeremiah, have a way of finding their audience; 
much of the Psalms may be foreign, but how much 
is essentially human? If Longinus calls Moses "no 
ordinary man," what of the greater figures in that 
literature? The great soul is implied in the whole- 
sale capture of men and generations — the great soul 
with the great experience behind it and the great 



270 THE PILGRIM 

thoughts welling up within it, however simple the 
language. Perhaps the last thing Paul thought of 
was style, yet a well-known German scholar tells us 
that he catches again in certain chapters of the 
epistles to the Romans and Corinthians just that 
great note which Greek literature had once had, but 
had lost for centuries. 1 If it were only convention, 
is it not well to know and understand the conventions 
of the people one meets — in books or streets ? But 
if it is a question of knowing what the generations 
have counted vital, should we not train ourselves, 
and teach our children, to be pleased with the best? 
Trivial tastes, pleasure in the commonplace, are no 
training for the great soul. It is customary with 
people who do not know Latin to suppose that edu- 
cation means educing something in a child ; the more 
real meaning is to bring a child out — out of what, 
or into< what? Surely into the real world, out of 
half -worlds and barren regions, into the best and 
the eternal. 

If education is to make a man free of the world, 
to open to him the doors that lead to the real things, 
the last great question is, Whose world is it? 
Wordsworth in the "Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
tality" describes how the interests of life gather 
thick about the growing boy, and close his eyes to 
the heaven that lies about us in our infancy, and 
crowd out that faculty of wonder, which, Plato said, 
1 Norden, in his "Kunstprosa," writing of Paul. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 271 

is the mother of philosophy. Yes, the interests and 
occupations of life overbear us, and "lay waste our 
powers," and we miss rd Kaipikrara. But on some 
men comes a sense of God, when and how, no man 
can predict. The rich man will rebuild his barns, 
and settle down to a life of rest and enjoyment; and 
there comes a tap on the shoulder; he wheels round 
and is face to face with — God! 

There's a sunset touch 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides, — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once as nature's self. 1 

One cannot live on the surface for ever, for ever 
haunt the circumference; when we begin to get be- 
low the surface a little, to dream of depths and to 
think out a centre — 'where are we? We are in the 
company of psalmist and prophet, apostle and philos- 
opher, pressing on to God. It must be God. But 
here we may lose ourselves in a dreamy mysticism, 
and, in contemplation of the abstract, drift at last 
with empty hands to nothing. No, that is to lose 
the value of human experience, tears and love and 
laughter, pain and friendship. And that is where 
the Bible and its writers, and its centuries of read- 
ers, help us; for with them God is not abstract 
They feel Him in the words of Christ; they touch 
Him in the person of Christ ; not abstract at all, He 
1 Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology." 



272 THE PILGRIM 

is intelligible and lovable in those pages — real. How 
are we to live in a real world at all, if the record of 
His discovery, of His revelation, is a sealed book 
to us, if His Incarnation is an idle word for us, 
if the surface of things is all, and the end a question 
mark? 



THE END 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
♦ Treatment Date: March 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 

■■-.£?;• (724) 77S-21 1 1 



